From: A.
Date: 04 February 2021
Dear comrades,
Here are some thoughts on the eve of the PB meeting.
The death of every communist and socialist organization in the United States has come through political liquidation into the Democratic Party. Not all, but much of the very little political discussion we’ve had in the SL/U.S. seems incidental and tangential, based on the wrong political premises, narrow in scope, and in the wrong political framework. Aligning with U.S. imperialism abroad via the Democratic Party, domestically capitulating to the capitalist state via Black Lives Matter, abandoning the fight against forcible segregation, and arguments about who emboldens the fascists do require investigation and correction. But we can’t fight our way out of the liberal muck unless we see what is fundamental and ties all these examples of betrayals together. We gave up the fight to finish the Civil War. That is our program for black liberation and the American proletarian socialist revolution. They go together, not singularly “in their own right.”
Every problem the American working class and the oppressed confront today comes directly out of capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union and East Europe, the unfinished American Civil War, and the defeat of Radical Reconstruction: U.S. imperialist expansion, citizenship rights, immigration, wage slavery, incarceration, integration/segregation, education, voting rights, land and property ownership, women’s rights, organizing labor unions, and more. The big lie in American society is that bourgeois democracy and suffrage rights to elect a government of the class enemy are the road to black power, equality, and justice. (I take issue with J.’s document on one point: we do not defend bourgeois democracy, which is the dictatorship of the capitalist class. We defend democratic rights and proletarian rights by fighting for them through class struggle.)
The discussion on forcible segregation, now and in 2011, seems to miss the main point. Segregation is not merely separation. Segregation in a race- and class-divided society means domination. In the U.S., it means white supremacy. Isn’t it ridiculous to debate whether a capitalist economy, founded on chattel slavery and still resting on the subjugation of blacks, is “de facto” or “de jure”? S.’s document on our defense of racially-segregated unions in longshore is important and true. The party’s longstanding acquiescence to segregation is copasetic with the maximum program of Black Lives Matter for better segregated schools and better police. The radical Abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens would be turning over in his grave in the black cemetery where he chose to buried to make the point in death that he fought for in life.
Black trade union bureaucrats are perhaps the most active popular constituency of the Democratic Party. The SL/U.S. has capitulated to these most effective labor lieutenants of capital. In doing so, our trajectory toward liquidation into the capitalist Democratic Party had the veneer of an an orientation to the black proletariat. Ditto the Mumia campaign, when the party leadership vigorously opposed carrying a banner against the Democratic Party in a Philadelphia demo on the eve of the 2008 Democratic Primary, and raised a Mumia banner as our maximum program in an Obama rally the night before. Rather than repeat myself, I am appending the political excerpts of a letter to D. that I submitted for discussion many months ago regarding when we began liquidating into the Democratic Party via black elected officials and trade union bureaucrats.
The draft PB memo screams opportunism in fear of itself. Just as the PB couldn’t say the name Trump in draft election statements, just as it couldn’t answer the “anybody but Trump” fever and feared capitulating to it, so now the PB trivializes the riot at the Capitol on January 6th by laughably calling it “an interruption.” Five people died. Were they “interrupted?” Trump did incite a riot by a Confederate flag-waving, Auschwitz-saluting, fascist-infested, evangelical mob. They rampaged against the ascension to the presidency of Trump’s bourgeois rival, Joseph Biden, whose political career was made brokering deals with the southern Dixiecrat party bosses of the Ku Klux Klan and presiding over mass incarceration and increased segregation as Clinton’s Vice President. So look who’s calling who “fascist.” Liberals and reformists are apoplectic that the police failed to protect the Capitol, the shrine of American democracy, built on the bones of millions of black slaves. Trump’s impeachment is truly a show trial by the wrong class for the wrong crime. (An interesting anecdote I can’t resist: Jamie Raskin, the head of the Democratic Party impeachment proceedings is a failed contact of ours from Harvard University in the early 1980s. In our last argument, he said, “twenty years from now you’ll still be an irrelevant sect. I replied, “and you’ll be in Congress saving capitalism.”)
The entire Democratic Party-loyal spectrum, from the ruling class to Black Lives Matter is clamoring (or providing a left cover, in the case of the IG) for increased state repression of the right. Increased state repression under Democratic Party rule, bolstered by reformists demanding that the capitalist state “do the right thing” is the historic norm in this country. It would be useful to reference the jailing of 18 leaders of the Socialist Workers Party under the Smith Act. Liberals demanded that legislation to curb hate speech and rallies by the fascist German-American Bund, but of course it was used against the Trotskyists for leading a general strike in Minneapolis and opposing World War II. Collusion between the state and the fascists on January 6th, expressed in the hands-off wink at the rioters, is nothing new either. From Gary Rowe and the Birmingham Church bombing, to the Greensboro massacre to the leader of the Proud Boys serving as an FBI informer—both parties of the capitalist class keep the fascists in reserve and unleash them at will.
I agree with much of what J. wrote about how WV’s repeated bleating that “Trump emboldens the fascists” was a plug for the Democrats. It’s also anti-Marxist. Fascism doesn’t spring from Trump’s mouth. What is the material basis for the growth of fascism? Capitalist counterrevolution across the former East European states and the Soviet Union gave a huge boost to fascism—worldwide—as everyone except the new capitalist rulers was devastated. The fascists have been steadily growing in the United States since the early 1980s, when they began their incursions into urban centers. Their growth is in inverse proportion to the decline of the organized labor movement and the immiserization of the petty bourgeoisie. Recall that the 1980s began with smashing PATCO and decimating once-powerful integrated unions like the UAW, aided and abetted by trade union bureaucrats like Doug Fraser, who swapped the lives of thousands of workers for a seat on Chrysler’s board of directors. When white workers are manipulated to believe that they are better than and threatened by black people and immigrants, no labor movement can succeed. The “open shop” South has taken over the north.
It is an empirical fact that the United States, especially in its urban centers, is rapidly becoming a majority minority country. This too has fueled the growth of the fascists. As J2. pointed out in a discussion at the PRL last week, the fascists had a big growth spurt in response to Obama’s election. Stoking white fear of economic ruin by blacks and immigrant labor also dates directly back to the defeat of Reconstruction and the unfinished Civil War.
I appreciate the reports at the IEC meeting every time I re-read them. I wish I didn’t need the continued sharp interventions by the IEC to see things myself, but I’m not there yet. The interventions by J3, S., J4. were a deflection of this fight and pushback against the IEC. Did those of us, including myself, not build “a different kind of party” since at least the 1990s? In her report to the IEC meeting, E. took responsibility for what she did. She is trying to lead this party together in more difficult circumstances than any of us ever faced. The arguments against our 1977 article struck a nerve with many party veterans. We fought the barrage of attacks that our party and Jim Robertson personally were “racist” because we defended the right of every person to exist, regardless of race or ethnicity. “Presentism” is a “politically correct” deformity. The takeaway point from this sorry episode is to investigate and learn something about history and context before launching attacks.
I agree that this surge of liberal race-baiting was rooted in opportunism. The delegation and PB indulged in inverted Anglo-chauvinism, importing “check your privilege, whitey” politics as a club within our own party. If the IEC delegation and PB believed their own allegations of racism, why didn’t they do anything? If they seriously thought there was a color bar at the PRL, why didn’t they fight it? Nobody talked to me, nobody talked to J5., nobody talked to H., but apparently plenty of people “in the know” talked to each other a whole lot in the corridors. The intended effect was to ostracize and shun comrades to consolidate one more politically insecure and deficient regime on a cliquist basis.
The PB could have used the hard-hitting points from V.’s letter about how race-baiting destroys parties. Instead, the PB had an urge to gush an apology to G., who quit at the first challenge to her command. Everybody gets roughed up in politics, sometimes wrongly. That shouldn’t override the commitment to building a Trotskyist party. Cannon said that when he got involved in politics, he learned to put on an old pair of pants. H. is a 50-year-cadre, one of precisely two comrades left in the SL/U.S. (to my knowledge) with a history of working in the south to fight Jim Crow (not to mention a central party leader in the SL/U.S. and I.S. who worked with Jim on most every split and fusion that built the ICL). And still, nobody on the PB has talked to her, much less apologized. The apology will be made by learning something and fighting for the cadre that we have.
I accept that the IEC leadership in London did not know the extent of the political damage until they read E.’s report two months after the events. But they did know they had a rogue delegation on their hands. Sharing that information with the IEC and SL/U.S. CC might have helped. It certainly would have blown the cover off false unity. We do not (perhaps not yet) have declared factions. The ICL does not believe in the discipline of higher party bodies with regard to political discussion.
I agree that cohering an international leadership is the top priority for the survival of the ICL. It’s no small feat that comrades have made real progress, in the midst of the pandemic and at considerable personal hardship, to move around the world. The SL/U.S. does need propaganda on the Democratic Party in power, but I was happy to read in Perrault’s last cover letter that the new I.S. will soon turn its attention to the COVID pandemic—not because I want to stop the fight with the SL/U.S., but because we need to grapple with the crisis that the proletariat faces worldwide. Thinking more broadly than the U.S. may also help the SL/U.S. reverse its refractory disintegration. There is no end in sight to this pandemic, which has intensified all the horrors and misery of capitalism worldwide. “Lockdown” increasingly seems to be the euphemism for “crackdown” against the proletariat and political protest. Despite incursions of capital and extreme scarcity (Cuba), the workers states are doing a notably better job (Vietnam). It will be difficult to distill a sharp international statement from a vast vat of description that may be interesting but is not essential. I hope that reports and discussion about COVID will lead to an ICL statement.
Comradely,
A.
Attachment: _______.201025
25 October 2020
Dear D.,
[…]
You asked if I had any thoughts on how we got to the point of embellishing the results of the Civil Rights Movement. Yes, I do. While a lot more research could and should be done, I’ve looked into back issues of WV to verify my memories of two episodes: the 1994 Springfield Labor/Black Mobilization to stop the KKK and the 1996 reprisals against the TWU for striking against the Taylor law. I don’t have access to the PB minutes or IBs to review.
In 1994, the Ku Klux Klan picked Martin Luther King day to rally for racist genocide in eight states. The PDC initiated a labor/black mobilization to stop them. Of course, the Klan did not target MLK day because King tied the Civil Rights Movement to the Democratic Party. They picked that date to terrorize every black man, woman, and child in America. Polemicizing against King in the course of building this demo was tricky. It would have been inappropriate to do so in the short PDC call for a united front demo. But our party propaganda in campaigning for this labor/black mobilization (we even put out a WV supplement) and our post-demo “lessons to be learned” propaganda are flaming evidence of a dive into the black Democratic Party milieu.
This was our first initiative for a mass labor/black mobilization in the post-Soviet world and we knew it would be an important test for us in the “new world order.” This demonstration also coincided with the liquidation of the American section into the Mumia campaign. Far from saying “everything that needs to be said” about the black question in America, this campaign was the party’s plunge into single-issue reformism, which always leads to the Democratic Party. We endlessly pursued black Democratic Party politicians and trade union bureaucrats to give the Mumia campaign the illusion of a mass base among black people. The trade union bureaucrats we chased were the generation of black union leaders who had walked holes in their shoe leather following Martin Luther King. Clearly, criticism of the politics of the Civil Rights Movement was softened or erased. Al and I were the on site leadership for this mobilization. I have more than an equal share of responsibility with the Political Bureau and Central Committee for this programmatic dive. The problem was our political framework, not individual cadres.
In mobilizing for Springfield, we emphasized the racism of the Clinton administration a whole lot more than our class opposition to this capitalist party of the ruling class—and particularly the racism within the Democratic Party. The front page article in WV no. 592 decries the Democrats for turning Jesse Jackson into an invisible man and maneuvering to oust black city mayors from office. Every single reference to a black Democratic Party leader is positive. The next issue, we ran a long presentation by Al Nelson to the Bay Area youth and party branches, drawing the lessons of Springfield (see “A Proletarian-Centered Strategy to Fight Fascism—Revolutionary Consciousness is Key). In this presentation, the Democrats are not portrayed as the class enemy and the single major obstacle to building a revolutionary workers party. Rather, Al envisions a seamless transition for black Democratic Party leaders to the SL:
“These Democrats who want to struggle have a very big contradiction: black people need a party that will fight for their interests. It is currently abundantly clear that that cannot happen within the Democratic Party. If a workers party with some social weight existed, some of the more serious of these black Democrats would very likely come over to such a party. And in fact in this instance, this microcosm of that equation, that's what happened. In this one- or two-week period, they did join forces with this small vanguard formation.”
The lead article in the supplement, presents King as a good guy who was unfortunately tethered to the Democratic Party, not an active opponent of politically independent mobilizations by blacks and labor movement. We have no criticism of the Civil Rights Movement or its leadership, just: ‘…that movement was shattered in Chicago [in 1966], where it came up against the segregation and discrimination against blacks in the North, who for years had lived with "equality under the law." Tied to the Democratic Party, Martin Luther King Jr. could not fight the root cause of black oppression-the rule of American capitalism.” There is the obligatory tip of the hat in the last paragraph of the article: “The Democrats and Republicans represent their class, the bourgeoisie. A workers party, built on an internationalist perspective, is needed …”.
B. gave the party speech at the rally continues this portrayal of black Civil Rights Leaders as victims of the Democrats, saying that the promise of black freedom was “dashed” and Martin Luther King was “stopped.” So the problems are external to the Civil Rights Movement, not that the politics and program of the CRM chained labor and the oppressed to the capitalist Democratic Party.
The best political arguments were presented by JH, speaking for the Bay Area Labor/Black League.:
“In 1877 with the defeat of Reconstruction and the pulling of Union troops out of the South, the young American capitalist class made a deal with remnants of the defeated slaveowners, and through it, its paramilitary arm-the Ku Klux Klan. The surging American capitalists, largely responding to a growing, organizing labor movement, were abandoning any perspective for a socially founded black freedom. The Ku Klux Klan was employed as the primary paramilitary force, the armed battering ram, which forcibly drove the former slaves to the bottom of American industrial capitalist society. It is not status as an oppressed nation, but this condition, determined on the one hand by fundamental integration into America's capitalist economic fabric, while on the other forcibly segregated on its bottom as a race-color caste, which is at the foundation of the sordid, horrible, wretched, agonizing living conditions for AfroAmericans today!
“The key to working-class unity, to working-class victory, is independence from all forces linked to the bourgeoisie. Working-class schoolchildren today grow up knowing that the Republican Party has represented big money interests for a long time, that the ReaganBush safety net was in fact a hangman's noose. But it must also be learned that the Democrats too are tied to big money going back to the days when the Democratic Party served as the political tool for the slaveowners. Malcolm X was right: a Democrat is nothing but a Dixiecrat.”
The other episode I recalled in response to your question about when did we embellish the Civil Rights Movement was the party’s response to the jailing of black TWU president Toussaint in 1996. Toussaint was jailed and the union was severely punished by the state for waging a strike in defiance of the Taylor Law. Black Democratic Party politicos rallied to Toussaint and declared him the new Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. WV apparently agreed (see articles in WV nos. 866 and 868). The absence of polemic against the TWU leadership was decried by C. M. who wrote a letter to WV (the BT also polemicized against us). We replied that you can’t criticize a union leadership when it is under attack. I need to think about this more.
At the time, I wrote a note to the PB and WV criticizing the uncritical portrayal of the Civil Rights Movement and its leadership. My document wasn’t circulated. I went to the unusual step of submitting my document a second time, and again it wasn’t circulated. I don’t have a copy and while it probably said nothing profound, it was a suppressed internal criticism of the publicly embellishing the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders. I was told, “there are worse things than being a Civil Rights leader.” True, but “lesser evilism” is not Trotskyism.”
The new party leaders in the international are tired of hearing me and others talk about the demise of the Soviet Union as a reason for the SL’s departures from revolutionary Marxism. I don’t want to oversimplify or use that as an excuse. But as we review our past, that world-changing defeat for the proletariat will stand out as a qualitative turning point. We were a rock hard Soviet-defensist party and, as such, it wasn’t really possible to position ourselves in the Democratic Party’s big tent. It’s troubling that while we spilled a lot of ink about the “retrogression of consciousness,” we were seemingly unaware of our own degeneration on the black question and the Democratic Party.
I hope this is of some use to you and L. in your pursuit of this question. Please do let me know if there is more digging you would like me to do. It was wonderful to have an assignment!
Comradely,
A.