American revolutionaries:
DOCUMENT—
We publish below major extracts from an article that appeared in the first issue of Socialist Action, a new monthly journal published in the United tance, but it does not purport to be a States, sponsored by an organization with the same name. substitute movement for the accredited organization was initiated by American Fourth Internationalists people's movement. who were expelled from the Socialist Workers Party, the organization in
At present the ANC has a real in- solidarity with the Fourth International in the USA. fluence in the mass movement. This is as much through the historic figures of International decided to continue to regard them as in the framework of certain of its leaders, under whose aus- the Fourth International (to the extent this is compatible with American pices, official or not, the UDF was law) and urged the SWP to reverse its organizational course and immedcreated, as through its members activity iately and collectively reintegrate the expelled comrades. Until this is in the unions or community and other done, the United Secretariat recognizes that the comrades expelled from associations. The armed struggle, which the SWP because of their political views will have no choice but to organessentially takes the form of attacks in ize collectively in order to, on the one hand participate in the discussion the urban zone, helps to strengthen the for the upcoming World Congress of the Fourth International and fight idea that the ANC is active everywhere for their political views, and on the other to carry out their responsibilities and thus is behind everything which as revolutionary class-struggle militants. moves. However, its strategic orientation The headline and crossheads are from Socialist Action Vol 1, No 1, is still articulated around its relations Socialist Action can be obtained by writing to the with the 'democrats' and thus in part • Publishing Association, 3435 Army Street, No. 308,
94110 San Francisco, California, USA. The subscription price for twelve with the white liberals. The alliance formed between sections of the Church issues is 6 dollars in North America, including Mexico, and 20 dollars for and the supporters of the Freedom Charter within the UDF is one response to the growth of the mass movement. The future relations of the UDF with the
This
At its October 1983 meeting,
December 1983.
Socialist Action other countries.
the United Secretariat of the Fourth
SoCiAlist trade-union movement remain one of the unknown elements in the situation. There could be a rush to influence this latter at the time when the question of trade-union unity is to be discussed. (24)
The UDF remains a coalition at the top and not an organisation based on individual membership. It is looking to unify the mass movement under its own leadership without giving any clear perspectives for mobilisation. The question of the future of the UDF and its popularity among the black masses remains linked to its ability to achieve this unification in a lasting fashion. Its immediate perspectives are around continuing the mobilisation against the government's constitutional proposals, but the UDF is not the only force at work in this struggle. ( 24. The declaration of the AN's executive committee welcoming the launch of the UDF took the opportunity to criticise "those who, while posing as socialists, champions of the working class and defenders of black pride, seek to divide the people and divert them from the pursuit of the goals enshrined in the Freedom Charter. Through their activities, these elements share a hatred for the Charter and for mass united action no less virulent than that displayed by the Pretoria regime.' International Viewpoint 13 February 1984
Every new political group is obligated to explain its origins and aims. This preview issue of our newspaper (we begin regular publication early next year) is to introduce ourselves to you, who we hope will become our regular readers. Socialist Action is a newspaper. It is also the name of a national organization founded at a conference in Chicago at the end of October 1983. It was initiated by a group of long-time socialists and activists in the antiwar, women's liberation and union movements who had been expelled from the Socialist Workers Party in the course of the last two years....
We have taken this step because the SWP is in the process of abandoning the principles upon which it was founded. Denied the opportunity to reverse this course and forced outside the SWP, we in Socialist Action have no choice but to attempt, from the outside, to stop the degeneration of the SWP. We strive to be reintegrated into the SWP on the basis of the democratic rights traditionally guaranteed to party members. This includes our right to maintain our faction inside the SWP. In the meantime we continue to carry on the political and organizational work of the revolutionary party of socialist workers.
The movement that became the Socialist Workers Party was founded in 1928 by a small group of leaders of the Com-
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WE RE GONNA Fight FIGHT FIGHTI Why Socialist Action formed... AGAINST APARTHEID Who we are, what we stand for
munist Party, led by James P. Cannon, who chose to follow Trotsky in the fight with the Stalin bureaucracy. After their expulsion, they too formed a public faction of the CP, becoming a separate political party only after the CP had irretrievably moved from revolutionary po-
In the 1930s the new organization led a number of important battles of the US labor movement, most notably the teamster general strike in Minneapolis
It participated in building the CIO unions in the late 1930s and in the post-World War II labor strike wave. Eighteen leaders of the SWP and of the Teamsters Union in Minneapolis were railroaded to jail for a year at the beginning of World War Il for their militant unionism and their socialist objections to confidence in the American ruling class's objectives in the war. the four of those 18 who remained in the SWP were expelled in 1982, and one of them, Jake Cooper, is a member of the National Committee of Socialist Action.
In the 1950s the SWP, although reduced to a small isolated group by the witch-hunt, put up an effective fight for civil liberties against
McCarthyite witch-hunters. national campaign by Jimmy Kutcher, a legless World War Il veteran fired by the thought-controllers from his clerical job at the Veterans Administration for his
His campaign for reinwon the endorsement of unions numbering millions of members and was championed by such well-known civil libertarians as I. F. Stone. Kutcher succeeded in getting his job back and setting a precedent that saved the jobs of many others whose views the government disapproved of. This year Jimmy Kutcher fell vietim to a purge in his own
In the 1960s the SWP was one of the first organizations on the Left to campaign for the construction of a mass, nonexclusive coalition to oppose the US invasion of Vietnam. Its representatives became leaders of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and of its youth affiliate, the Stucommittees were instrumental in calling demonstrations in Washington, cisco and New York in which as many as a million North Americans participated at one time (November 1969). Many of us in Socialist Action took part in building those actions, which we are convinced helped to persuade the American people to oppose the war, isolated the Johnson and Nixon administrations and saved the many draftees the heroic people of Vietnam. A dispute over perspectives for US Marxists
It is not our intention in future issues of Socialist Action to dwell on differences with the Socialist Workers Party. Nevertheless, an account of the political dispute as it concerns major issues on which all sections of the Left have taken and must take positions can only help to define our own trajectory as well as that of the SWP. Even after some years of rapid decline in membership, the SWP remains one of the four or five largest organizations of the US Left, and its experience in seeking to build a party of comrevolutionists should have interest to everyone engaged in a similar enter-
Immediately following the August 1981 party convention - the last that will be held before next summer, a year overdue - a sharp dispute erupted in the SWP over three issues. These proved to have some relationship: our assessment of Trotsky's Marxism; our attitude toward capitalist and Stalinist governments in conflict with imperialism but simultanengaged in political repression within their own borders; and our willingness to participate in and build formations such as the women's, antinuclear and antiwar movements, as well as the unions, of which a majority of the party's
Marx and Engels, the founders of the modern socialist and communist movements, originally posed the idea of a socialist reorganization of society as a possibility only for relatively industrialized countries. They reasoned that without large-scale industry, national planning
Further, small farmers, shopkeepers and artisans would be against nationalization of their workplaces, while factory workers, who did previously, would be in favor of nationalization as a means to take over control from private
Hence, without a majority of workers in the population there seemed to be no basis for any substantial government ownership on which the planned development of production for human needs could rest.
In the early years of the 20th century, large revolutionary movements arose in many under-developed countries. posed for the first time the question of whether revolutions in primarily peasant nations could move relatively swifly to socialist nationalizations and the beginnings of planned economies, or whether they would have to retain private ownerindustry with draining off of resources into the pockets
It was the Russian Marxist movement that first began to discuss this question seriously, around the time of the 1905 the first of the Russian Marxists to propose the possibility of a revolution against the tsar that would set up an socialist government. the essence of his famous "theory of permanent revolution." At that time virtually the entire Marxist movement doubted the possibility of such a course. Lenin, the greatest of the Russian Marxists, disagreed with Trotsky's idea. Later, in 1917, Lenin concluded independently that nothing short of a socialist government could solve Russia's problems. His thinking in effect converged with that of Trotsky's in the period leading up to the Bolshevik revolution in October
Afterward, during the rise of Stalin, the conservative bureaucracy sought to discredit its opponents on the Left by working to discredit all of his ideas, including that of really an attack on Lenin as well, it fitted in with the general retreat by the Stalinists from any serious attempt to organize revolutionary movements. In place of the struggle for socialism, they called for broad antiimperialist or antifascist movements and governments that in practice proved loose enough to leave the power in the hands of the liberal capitalist par-
The usual consequence was the defeat of revolutionary mass mobilizations through their failure to take decisive action in a period of revolutionary crisis.
Immediately after the party convention in 1981, with no possiblility for anyone who disagreed to reply, Jack the SWP's central leader, announced that he no longer accepted the idea of fighting for a directly socialist revolution in underdeveloped countries. This led in the summer of 1983 to the publication of a special issue of the SWP's theoretical magazine New International, in which Barnes insisted that "our move. ment must discard permanent revolution"
To reject one of the fundamental ideas of the organization in a public magazine, without it having allowed a discussion of it, was a gross violation of the democratic rights of the party mem-
Politically, many party members were convinced that this break with the strategy of Lenin and Trotsky marked a serious adaptation to Stalinist ideology. Many of the same arguments used by Stalin in the 1920s against the Leninist Opposition in the Soviet Communist Party were used by the SWP leadership, in this magazine and in other articles, to attack the party's own previous positions, which it had held for more than 50 years. In 1982 supporters of Trotskyist ideology and supporters of the Fourth International began to be expelled from the SWP on a variety of organizational pretexts. Poland and Iran
On December 13, 1981, martial law was declared in Poland and the Stalinist government began the decapitation of the 10-million member Solidarnosc union led by Lech Walesa. In 1968 at the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the SWP had participated in joint demonstrations and protest meetings with other groups on the Left. The same was true of all the organizations of the Fourth International. At that time the Trotskyists sought to exclude from such protests anticommunists or groups that did not have a record of forthright opposition to the crimes of capitalist governments, such as the US war in Vietnam.
In 1981 it was clear the SWP did not
International Viewpoint 13 February 1984
workers' also the Polish CP.
censorship.
ary."
our common foe possible only
Shortly from The through taking place.
century.
The selfmovement. Finally even the trade unions, where the membership had all gone to escape the "petty bourgeois"
Left, also became nothing but "petty bourgeois bureaucrats."
Party members in the unions confine their activity largely to general socialist propaganda work with individual workers. Because this is not oriented around actual issues that appear in workers' lives or around the organizations they belong to now, such work has proven ineffectual and has won very few members to the party.
We are for a sharp break from this policy of self-isolation. We regret that many good people in an organization to which we devoted many years have worked themselves into such a corner. We have a special concern here because while we are no longer members of the SWP, both we and the SWP are sympathizers of the same world movement. Moreover, it is a movement in which our perspective holds a strong majority, although the relationship of forces is reversed here in the United States. We would like to see all supporters of the Fourth International in the United States belong to a single organization. To express that idea we have decided to organize ourselves as a public faction of the SWP, since it is the larger of the two groups in this country that are in solidarity with the Fourth International. Organizing ourselves as a public faction expresses our hope that the party will restore its prior democratic norms, readmit the expelled as a body, and open a discussion of the wrong political line it has embarked on in the last two years.
We hope to work with all others, including the SWP, who want to engage in real struggles against the masters of our society. Although we are beginning as a small organization, from the outset we have committed ourselves to participate as fully as we are able in the central fights of our day. As this issue of Socialist Action indicates, we are working to build solidarity with the Greyhound strikers across the country. Many of our members were organizers of the November 12 demonstrations in solidarity with the peoples of Central America and the Caribbean. In the Monongahela Valley of
This was done by deother left-wing the press.
in correct; by were simply the anyway.
southwestern Pennsylvania we are participating in the movement of the unemployed. As Reagan mobilizes the ultra-right and the raw power of the Marines, our responsibilities become more pressing: Every organization of the Left must contribute what it can to bring to bear the counterpower of the US working class. We think that can best be done today through broad struggle coalitions such as the ones being built around opposition to US intervention in Central America. We are also convinced that only a world movement, with a disciplined The exceptions membership, a press and an overall strategy, can hope to have an effect on events that change their focus from day to day and from city to city. That is why we have chosen to carry out our work through Socialist Action. We hope that many of you will join us.
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