AROUND THE WORLD
OBITUARY
George Weissman 1916-1985
Faithful to the end erans Committee in the Bronx, NY; the Committee to Combat Racial Injustice, of which he was the secretary; the Civil Rights Defense Committee during the period when it defended Carl Skoglund, a revolutionary union leader whom the revolutionary union leader whom tha 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 US and American history. Perhaps a collection of these will be published some day. • Surviving relatives are Muriel MeAvoy, Weissman's second wife, and three stepchildren - James Harding of Manhattan, Dorothea Lobsenz of Los Angeles and Timothy Harding of Los Angeles. We extend our condolences to them and to his many friends here and in Mexico.
The revolutionary movement has lost a steadfast fighter, an untiring builder, and a wise counsellor. We honor him by continuing the struggle he conducted for 49 years and by seeking to recruit and educate others in his mold. Young revolutionaries will not find a better model.
A memorial meeting for George Lavan Weissman will be held in Manhattan on Saturday, 25 May, at 7.30 pm. For further details about speakers, place, etc., write the FIT, PO Box 1947, New York, NY 10009, or phone (212) 673-9410 or (718) 934-6281. QUEBEC
Five thousand protest
Reagan-Mulroney summit
QUEBEC CITY - Chanting "Yankee, go home" , "Reagan murderer" • and "Reagan-Mulroney, no way!" some 5,000 protesters from across Quebec converged here March 17 to demonstrate their opposition to the "Shamrock Summit" between Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and US President Ronald Reagan.
Opposition to the deepening US war in Central America was a central theme of the overwhelmingly youthful demonstration. Banners and placards demanding British troops out of Northern Ireland, an end to apartheid in South Africa, US out of the Philippines, and Reagan out of Quebec were also visible.
International Viewpoint 22 April 1985
The following article on the death of George Lavan Weissman, a veteran leader of the Socialist Workers Party of the
United States, was written by the editorial board of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, of which Weissman was a member until his death. He was expelled from the Socialist Workers Party late in 1983, in a wave of expulsions that were condemned by the leading bodies of the Fourth International at the time. This condemnation was reconfirmed by the Twelfth Congress of the Fourth International in February. The Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, is the publication of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, one of the two groups of expellees from the SWP that remain in the framework of the Fourth International. The following has been slightly abridged.
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.
le will be remembered as a founding nember of the Socialist Workers Part and the Fourth International in 1938 and as a founder member 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. 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 of 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 20 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 26 a volunteer organizer for several unions in New England. In this capacity he was active in a rank and file seaman'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 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. 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 US 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 a 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 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 1970's.
Weissman and another SWP member, Constance Fox Harding (1908-72), were married after he left the army, 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.
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 Vet-
Opposition to the US and Canadian nuclear arms build-up - cruise missile tests, "Star Wars" , and the new radar warning network to be built in northern Canada - was another popular theme. Highlighting the failure of the summit to take steps to deal with acid rain, Greenpeace launched a 30-foot balloon asking Reagan: "Where's the fish?"
The demonstration was organised by the Coalition for Peace, Justice and Freedom, a broad coalition of unions, youth and women's groups, Central America solidarity committees, peace, ecology and left groups.
The Coalition's platform explains that "the American government is the principal leader of the anti-union and antisocial offensive of the bosses and their governments throughout the world ... We solidarize with the American workers, women, youth, and national minorities who are struggling against Reaganism and youth of Nicara la so are sze wine te its effects ... We also solidarize with the defend their country, their social and democratic revolution against US aggression."
The summit marked a further increase in the close collaboration between the Canadian and US governments in the war drive:
- An increase in Canadian troops assigned to NATO forces in Europe; - Canadian participation in and support for the US space research program "Star Wars"; - A US-Canada treaty to upgrade the Dew line - the radar network in Northern Canada;
- Mulroney's reaffirmation that Can-
Dada is not neutral but a close ally of US imperialism. Canada's Conservative government DOMINICAN REPUBLIC the Bloque The Liga Comunista Revolucionaria (LCR), a sympathising group of the Fourth International in the Dominican Republic, has recently decided to fuse with the revolutionary organisation, Bloque Socialista (BS).
The BS, which held its first congress in June 1984, (see International Viewpoint, No 60, 1 October 1984) came into existence as a result of the fusion of the Communist Workers Nucleus, the Socialist Party and the Workers Socialist Movement, following a long process of coordination of these different organisations. The BS is also a member of the Dominican Left Front (FID), set up on 14 June, 1984. We publish below the joint statement adopted by the BS and the ICR concerning the integration of members of the latter into the Bloque Socialista.
The Bloque Socialista and the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria are well aware International Viewpoint 22 April 1985 consciously chose Quebec City to host the highly publicized summit. Canadian External Affairs minister Joe Clark explained that this would help assure big business that Quebec is now a stable and reliable place to invest and that the danger of Quebec separating from Canada is a thing of the past.
In fact, the struggle for Quebec's national rights has suffered a series of blows at the hands of the Canadian government. By unilaterally amending Canada's constitution in 1982, it deprived the Quebec government of its veto power over future constitutional changes and undermined its ability to protect and promote French as the language of public education. Bowing to imperialists' pressure, the Parti Quebecois (PQ) leadership, who hold office in Quebec, recently decided to put aside the demand for Quebec's independence.
The Canadian authorities and the media did everything in their power to create the impression that the Quebecois welcomed and were honored by Reagan's visit. Quebecois artists, PQ government ministers and union leaders like Louis Laberge of the 400,000-strong Quebec Federaton of Labor were invited to the ceremonies. Massive security arrangements were put in place.
Despite all these efforts to discourage any form of protest, the turnout for the demonstration was double what the organizers had predicted. Questions and opposition raised in the Canadian parliament by the New Democratic Party and to a lesser extent the Liberal Party over closer US-Canada military ties, especially around nuclear weapons, are another reflection of the broad unease throughout Canada with the convergent war policies of both governments. Socialista of the need for unity amongst revolutionary Marxists at this crucial stage for our country and for the workers movement internationally and, having debated the decision of the LCR to join the ranks of the BS, we have agreed on the following procedure for their integration.
This is yet another step on the road to unity of Dominican socialists which is part of the trajectory mapped out by the Bloque Socialista. The BS itself is the product of a fusion of several organisations which, at the end of 1981, set up the BS as a coalition of revolutionary socialists which later fused together.
The LCR, the Dominican organisation in sympathy with the Fourth International, was founded in 1980 and since 1981 has been an integrated part of the United Left (IU) along with the BS and other revolutionary organisations. They later also formed part of the Dominican Left Front (FID) and decided at their most recent congress that they should be part of a current which fights for the construction of a socialist revolutionary workers party in the Dominican Republic.
At the present time the tool in this process is the Bloque Socialista. As workers, peasants, women, young people and as all the oppressed, we find ourselves facing the most brutal oppression we have ever experienced, flowing from the policies of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) government of Salvador Jorge Blanco, under the pro-imperialist diktat of the International Monetary Fund.
The most effective weapon that the people have is their fighting unity and independence. Those organisations which identify with popular interests are duty bound to channel all their energies into developing this potential. As revolutionary Marxists we must be the first to go forward on this road, rising above secondary differences. In this lies the significance of the advance which the BS and the LCR are making today.
Our unification is motivated essentially by the immediate and mid-term interests of the popular masses who are demanding the surest unity of their own organised forces. They are demanding rapid progress toward the construction of an effective instrument for the fight to roll back the offensive of the bourgeoisie and of imperialism, which causes both repression and hunger; and to take up the fight for a lasting equality for the oppressed of the country.
Such progress towards socialist unity will also prove a step forward for the FID, creating the best conditions to live up to the organisational tasks and objectives that the Front had set itself: that is to unite revolutionaries, in order to build a revolutionary alternative.
Finally we call on all those organisations that form part of the FID and all nose wno are not part or land the large those who are not part of it and the large number of revolutionary activists who are not organisea, to look upon this step as a not organised, to look upon this step as a stimulus toward the necessary unity of the popular forces in the Dominican Republic. Free till victory or till death!
Bloque Socialista (BS)
Liga Comunista Revolucionaria (LCR)
Santo Domingo, 17 January 1985 ERRATUM
An error appeared in the last issue of International Viewpoint, No 73, dated 8 April 1985. In the article entitled Revolutionary nationalism and the anti-bureaucratic revolution' in the last section on page 26, the paragraph beginning 'Secondly ... ' should continue as follows: 'although the OUN leaders were for collaboration and alli• ances with all national liberation movements as well as for an alliance with the oppressed Russian working people they rejected proletarian internationalism.'
The next paragraph would then begin "Thirdly' to be followed by 'although the OUN leaders recognised the October Revolution ...' as in the printed text.
27
The LCR joins
The LCR joins