“Two, unless these workers centers are doing bona fide collective bargaining, with written contracts binding the employer, in writing, in a document enforceable both in court and on the streets, to provide certain wages, working hours, working conditions, terms of employment, grievance procedures and benefits, the “New Worker Organizing” they are doing isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.

I know that sounds harsh, but the reality is, American workers need REAL LABOR UNIONS (Especially Latin@ workers – Mr Garvey’s “Spanish Speakers” – and doubly especially Latin@ immigrant workers)

We don’t need discussion groups, or clubs, or self help groups, or self employment “worker cooperative” schemes – we need real unions that can lead real pre 1937 style recognition strikes and fight them both on the street and in the court system.

Other than the Laundry Workers Center, I really don’t see that.

I see a lot of social work, and I see a lot of employment agencies (the jornalero centers) and a lot of lobbying, but I don’t see real trade unionism going on outside of LWC.”

I’d be careful about this point. Again, I’m writing in terms of the New York City context, but the worker center/workers’ rights nonprofit Brandworkers International ( http://www.brandworkers.org/ ) has been very successful in its agitational and organizing efforts — in joint efforts with NYC’s IWW branch, it’s led a string of union organizing and legal victories over the past couple of years (just browse through the web site for details). Not to mention that it also has a considerable working class base (situated in the food production and processing industry of the city), consisting primarily of immigrant workers with roots in the Latin American nation-states. It also has/had (more likely had, at this point) the involvement of two workers of Chinese descent (both Mandarin Chinese speakers, so far as I can tell/recall). Additionally, it has performed memorial activities in honor of a young worker from Guatemala who died in an industrial accident.

Finally, I can also add that the executive director of Brandworkers is also a frequent contributor to left publications such as Counterpunch. Granted, so far as Counterpunch is concerned, I’m well aware of the fact that it publishes (or has published) paleoconservatives like Paul Craig Roberts and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists like Israel Shamir (who also wrote a paean to the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot for…. Counterpunch).

“A couple of things.

One – “Spanish Speaking”?

Seriously?

Was this article written in 1947?

I’m surprised he didn’t talk about “Negroes” and “Orientals”!”

Well, speaking from personal experience, I’ve seen the term “Spanish speakers” in outreach materials at the Queens Library location in Flushing, New York CIty. And, for the record, I’ve also seen the term “Chinese speakers” — that’s not really surprising given that present-day Flushing is a fairly diverse community, consisting of immigrants from East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia along with immigrants from Latin America. Granted, though, the majority consists of immigrants from China (back in the 1980s and 1990s, immigrants from Taiwan) who tend to speak Fujianese, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, etc.

I can just as well point out that there may be a few, some, or a lot of Latin@ workers who speak Portuguese as their first language.

Likewise, some Latin@s may prefer to self-identify as Chican@.

For an anti-statist, what stands out about Trotsky is that he was responsible for massacring the Kronstadt rebels and the revolutionary peasants of the Ukraine. He favored labor camps for dissenters, militarization of labor, strictest discipline in the factories and always increasing productivity. Big surprise that the workers hated him.

One – “Spanish Speaking”?

Seriously?

Was this article written in 1947?

I’m surprised he didn’t talk about “Negroes” and “Orientals”!

I actually contacted the author about that, when I read this article elsewhere he gave some bullshitty evasive excuse for his archaic racial terminology.

Two, unless these workers centers are doing bona fide collective bargaining, with written contracts binding the employer, in writing, in a document enforceable both in court and on the streets, to provide certain wages, working hours, working conditions, terms of employment, grievance procedures and benefits, the “New Worker Organizing” they are doing isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.

I know that sounds harsh, but the reality is, American workers need REAL LABOR UNIONS (Especially Latin@ workers – Mr Garvey’s “Spanish Speakers” – and doubly especially Latin@ immigrant workers)

We don’t need discussion groups, or clubs, or self help groups, or self employment “worker cooperative” schemes – we need real unions that can lead real pre 1937 style recognition strikes and fight them both on the street and in the court system.

Other than the Laundry Workers Center, I really don’t see that.

I see a lot of social work, and I see a lot of employment agencies (the jornalero centers) and a lot of lobbying, but I don’t see real trade unionism going on outside of LWC

That includes the OUR Walmart group, who are basically doing advocacy and lobbying backed by the occasional concerted action, but they aren’t going for all the marbles and demanding union recognition.

That’s a problem

Moving along, “At times they seem to assimilate Marx and Engels to a “classical Marxism” (the German SPD) which was “statist.” The SPD was in fact statist (i.e., “Lassallean”), but Marx and Engels wrote scathing critiques of it for exactly that.

Not so. Firstly, there were two main disagreements between Lassalle: the latter’s “iron law of wages,” and the his strategy of seeking an alliance with the Kaiser’s government in order to defeat the bourgeoisie and, over time, to establish socialism. Lassalle wanted to use the existing state, Marx insisted it had to be overthrown and a workers’ state take its place. Hence they held two opposing statist theories.

But this is not what anarchos mean by statism–the use of the state to effect socialism. We are against any state, including Marx’ workers’ state, which for us is an oxymoron. Engels said the state was necessary for the proletariat to hold its class enemies in subjection, we argue that any state holds everybody in subjection. Accordingly for us it is a false dichotomy to contrast Marx’ and Lassalle’s statisms. In any case, it was not for statism generally which caused Marx and Engels to critique Lassalle, rather it was the latter’s particular ideas on the subject.

Moreover, the SPD was not Lassallean. It was in fact a merger of Lassalle workers’ association [can't remember name] and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, which was solidly Marxist. The rest of Moriarty’s criticism on these lines are rendered meaningless by his fundamental mistakes of stating that the SPD was not Marxist; that it was statist because it was Lassallean; and that its revolting reformism was due to its Lassallean nature.

“The greatest weakness of Black Flame is its almost total lack of a discussion of the Marxists (after Marx) that one might broadly call “libertarian communist,” namely Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, CLR James and some aspects of Guy Debord. It also lacks an in-depth consideration of the soviets and workers’ councils in the Russian and German revolutions…”

Once again, Black Flame is a book about anarcho-syndicalism, not a history of the various tendencies within Marxism.

“There were thirty years of CNT/FAI rejection of “politics” and the state, and suddenly, in 1936, they have ministerial portfolios in a bourgeois government.”

Indeed, most anarchos I know would agree with you, but this is an odd line of criticism for a Marxist.

“Yes, the IWW was syndicalist, but IWW rank-and-filers organized study groups on Marx’s Capital, one of the few mass movements in the West where that happened, to my knowledge.”

If Moriarty means the American West, then there is a chance he is correct, but if he means the broader West, then he is not. Furthermore, many anarchos, myself included, have read Marx. He has made an enormous contribution to the socialist movement. But if they remained Wobblies then they obviously broke with Marxist theory to some degree.

“Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution for Russia (Marx had one for Germany) was a blast precisely against the two-stage theory, and it is completely false to say that the bourgeois revolution fell to the “party.” It fell to the working class, as was confirmed by 1905 and again by 1917. Trotsky was an anti-Leninist when he developed the theory, and it was a total outlier in the European revolutionary milieu until 1917 when Lenin adopted it. Such sloppiness, even on a small point, makes one wonder just how much Schmidt and van der Walt know about the adversary.”

First, the adversary is capital. Second, Moriarty is in no position to talk abt sloppiness. Third, did the events of 1905 disprove the stages theory? How so? It is not merely the case of the proletariat participating in revolutionary activity, they have done that throughout history, it is a matter of its claiming power and exercising it over the other classes. This certainly did not occur. Fourth, did Lenin accept the theory of permanent revolution. There are certainly some Leninists who disagree [the CPGB, M-L, leaps to mind].

“The truth was that many people they call anarchists and syndicalists found something in early Third International communism that was lacking in anarchism and syndicalism. As they do say, many anarchists and syndicalists read Lenin’s State and Revolution and assumed that anarchists had taken power in Russia.”

Now that is a remarkable statement. Indeed SAR was written at the end of Lenin’s hippy period, which began with his Theses, but neither of those flower-power tomes in any way reflected the totalitarian state Lenin instituted in Russia. And SAR contained passages which were explicitly statist and would not be acceptable to anarchos. Indeed there were some who went over to the Bolsheviks, they were called anarcho-Bolsheviks, but this was due largely to resignation rather than a belief that Lenin had become an anarchist. That is utterly preposterous.

Moreover, anarchos don’t take power, that is the point of anarchism.

Moriarty stated at the outset that his was going to be a comradely critique. It was hardly that.

Also, the Russian soviets of 1905 were created under anarchist influence and had participation by anarchists, especially when they re-appeared in 1917 (see Voline’s The Unknown Revolution), and the anarchists were defeated in Russia and Spain mainly due to a deliberate campaign of violence by the Marxists, although obviously they made errors and could be criticized on any number of specifics, such as when the CNT moderates joined the government. But you can’t discuss the anarchists in the Russian and Spanish revolutions without admitting that they were attacked and murdered by Marxists.

Appreciating this history as it unfolded in 1927 in real time, it is easy to see how people, from the masses below to the young leaders, could believe that continuing the alliance with Chiang made sense. Was it mistaken? seems like it., but an easy call for us to make today. Nonetheless, that this didn’t work out and the horrific crimes that occurred as a result are squarely the fault of Chiang and the KMT which increasingly took on a fascistic character after that time.

You might have a point had not people from Marx’s time on down been warning against any alliance with the bourgeoisie. It’s not like there weren’t several sources on the arguing against popular frontism. Heck, even Stalin and company held the position until they decided to pull an ideological shift to match their heart-warming alliance with Hitler.

So the KMT “betrayal” was less of a surprise than a big tragic “I told you so.”

Sadder still is that people like you who should know better still haven’t learned the lesson.

Surely the young leadership of the revolution was influenced by various ideological sources, not the least of which was the legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution and yes, Stalin, but it is simply wrong to characterize the revolution there, or in Vietnam for that matter, as “Stalinist” implying it was a franchise of Moscow or part of the “international communist conspiracy” and not something with its own deep local roots which were the primary aspect of it. This may sound a little exaggerated, but I really believe these sterile academic analyses reflect subtle anti-communist influences and neo-conservative tendencies of middle class intellectuals who grew up in a Cold War environment. In Oppose Book Worship, Mao talks about how intellectuals from privileged social backgrounds pave the way, consciously and unconsciously, for their drift to the right and counter-revolution through ultraleft and orthodox posturing while scripture quoting classic marxist texts.

Any revolution or struggle, least of all the massive, epochal, 20th Century Chinese Revolution will experience various viccissitudes, set backs etc., ones that can be analyzed and parsed in great detail by armchair revolutionaries decades later. Ultimately, however, this revolution, like revolutions more generally, was a process driven from below by deep class contradictions and often spontaneous ferment. That the 30 something leadership of Mao and his milieu, itself-like Robespierre and the Jacobins in 1789- a layer and phenomenon thrown to the surface by this massive storm, committed mistakes in the heat of this struggle is unremarkable. Attributing corrupt or venal motives to that is another matter and entirely off base.

Related to that, as with similar analyses of Spain, is the tendency of this “expert” school of trotskyoid history to shift the onus for the defeats, problems and shortcomings of the revolutionary process away from counter-revolution which was responsible for them. Thus we have little condemnation of Chiang, his betrayal and brutal repression, which is barely even mentioned while seeking to blame Mao for that. Ditto with Spain with barely a mention of Franco. Ditto with Allende and Chile. Seems like our experts need to educate themselves on basic history. “When you treat enemies like friends and friends like enemies, you yourself take the side of the enemy”-Mao

Appreciating this history as it unfolded in 1927 in real time, it is easy to see how people, from the masses below to the young leaders, could believe that continuing the alliance with Chiang made sense. Was it mistaken? seems like it., but an easy call for us to make today. Nonetheless, that this didn’t work out and the horrific crimes that occurred as a result are squarely the fault of Chiang and the KMT which increasingly took on a fascistic character after that time. A good introduction and overview of the Chinese Revolution and its background for those who in reality may be novices to this subject is Barbara Tuchman’s excellent “Stilwell and the American Experience in China”

First of all, is this not exactly what the CTU strike was “about” (working conditions for adults are assumed to be somehow related to learning environments for students , no?)?  Second of all, the “what” of learning is likewise inextricably linked to the “how,” as you point out in the sentence immediately prior to the above.  As an example, why am I (dual cert. Math and Sp.ed. teaching in a Title 1 high school) being forced to teach intermediate Algebra content, in the format of a mandated college-prep curriculum which is built on the assumption of requisite skill sets, as well as average to above-average intelleligence, to students with IQ scores below 70, many of whom require a calculator for single-digit operations?  Is there not something else to be done with the school day that might be slightly less alienating (and much more in line with individual needs and abilities) for these students?  Mind you, I am far from being anything close to a “cognitive fundamentalist,” but there is something amiss here, and when our school (as well as every other school with a disproportionately high number of sp.ed. and ESL/ELL students) is labeled “Persistently Low-Achieving” time and again, after, surprise, suprise, the aforementioned students fail to score a 19 in the ACT math subtest, the local bourgeuois press, and the School Board, and the State Department will scream yet again, “See – mediocre scores, mediocre schools, close them, defund them, ‘transform them!’”

I would be careful about the importance you give to test scores here, and would ask you, exactly, how it is that we might fight “transformation” on their terms if not in the way that the CTU has.  

As an aside, the NAEP came up recently in our district, and one of the tricks in the state in which I teach has been to exclude students with disabilities from taking this test.  This is, of course, patent discrimination.  The state’s justification?  Students with disabilities are not provided accommodations on the NAEP – likewise, patent discrimination.  NAEP’s justification?  The accuracy of their exam would be compromised.

The point being, our most vulnerable populations (e.g. students with disabilities and new immigrants with limited proficiency in English) are being hammered by demands that they perform as well as their peers on standards-based, and sometimes norm-referenced (e.g. the ACT) measures of academic achievement, performance and skills-acquisition.  Such measures are not designed with these students in mind, the companies which produce them assume that the extent to which these tests are valid is PRECISELY the extent to which these students score very poorly (e.g. Quality Core, ACT), and they work very hard to guarantee that the testing accommodations to which these students are legally entitled are denied them when/wherever possible.  As far as the ACT goes, this means the necessity of a standard distribution, or else colleges and universities (by nature highly exclusionist in academic terms) will consider such exams worthless.  The crux of the matter becomes clear when a state, like ours, suddenly decides that the ACT is their new accountability gold-standard, and that the standard distribution “does not matter.”  In addition, by placing a new emphasis on dropout rates and attrition, many students who would never have laid eyes on a college entrance exam two years ago will now be included in this number.

All combined, this becomes the latest recipe for making our poorest public schools look like disaster zones.  In short, the tests are another weapon to be wielded by capitalists against the ‘expense’ of basic social provision.  The context and approach may vary over time, but the basic assumption will always be, “We can’t afford to subsidize the education of those who won’t be likely to contribute very much to the surplus anyway, so how best to cut this expense?”  It might be dressed up as the latest imperative to “Close the Achievement Gap,” or some such nonsense, but that’s just used to sell it all too the many well- intentioned liberals who still have jobs (as of today) in Central Office.

I apologize for the tone, but I can tell you from very real and immediate experience that the issues related to assessment and due process for sp.ed. students in CPS are exactly the same issues we struggle with in our district, and I am personally inspired by the CTU strike action.  I don’t care much for any analysis that ridicules such resistance, or anyone who would applaud such resistance, as being part of the “ordinary left,” and in the same breath browbeats teachers and students for their “mediocrity” as indicated by capitalist tools of measurement.  

Proyect says exactly what every clown who supported, or indeed was a member of, popular fronts, “lesser evil” Democrats, trade-union bureaucrats, social democrats has said: “I’ve been doing this for thirty years, kid. Have some respect.”

To which one can only reply. “You’ve been doing it wrong for more than thirty years. Drop dead.”

Such is the luxury afforded a commentator in a world created by the Soviet defeat of German fascism and the Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese reclaiming of countries from U.S. imperialism.

John

About unions or new organizations—I wouldn’t want to pre-judge the situation in any particular place. It might be possible for a union to transform itself into a constituent party to a new class-wide group that included students and community members. However, in light of the ways that laws, customs and the ambitions of union officials constrict unions’ practices, I’d be inclined to think that new organizations will be necessary.

About our “own” criteria for student success: I have two quite different responses. First, in the short run, we need to be really sensitive to the profoundly idiosyncratic ways in which individuals develop and learn (as distinctive as fingerprints) and that our criteria always need to be sensitive to the goal of engaging children and sustaining development. Therefore, the criteria we need to apply are primarily criteria about what the adults do and what the learning environments are like, rather than what the children learn. Second, in the long run, I think education needs to lay the groundwork for the progressive abolition of the distinction between mental and manual labor—a goal that would imply far greater levels of knowledge and skill acquisition for almost everyone than we’re familiar with.

About the defeat of the black community in 1968: I’m not especially interested in defending the particular demands of the community control movement (although I do think they need to be placed in the context of many years of stubborn white resistance to school desegregation). Nonetheless, combined with the earlier defeat of a proposal for a civilian review board for the police department, the decentralization that was adopted as an alternative to community control transformed a popular mobilization into a quagmire of nepotistic corruption which all but completely led to the dominance of the UFT in the city’s education system for thirty years. In retrospect, it would probably have been better if the community control advocates were more sophisticated about the educational issues but, perhaps to our dismay, a comparable effort in Chicago years later (with a much more sophisticated analysis) didn’t lead to much more.

About good teaching can’t being measured: I confess that this is an impressionistic judgment based on reading lots of teacher comments in various media, including blogs. I may be wrong. In any case, I really think that teaching needs to be informed by a coherent understanding of learning and not by a whole bunch of common sense assumptions.

About lousy schools: I k now that the tests are really lousy (perhaps we can meet some time so we can share stories about them) and are not necessarily good measures BUT kids in schools that have really high scores do really well on all sorts of other important measures. I have no interest in test prep but I have a lot of interest in kids learning a lot. High scores, not mediocre scores, reveal that kids have learned a lot. About dropouts: I realize that there are really good reasons why kids drop out of school. In the absence of any other good opportunities for kids to learn very much, however, I see their dropping out as a defeat.

About time: I agree—it’s all about time. Every teacher should be fighting every day about time!

John

John

Many more things I could comment on in this article. My overall feeling is that we teachers need to push our colleagues to do better, to be more aware of the big picture and have this inform our teaching. But my other strong feeling is: when the hell are we going to have time to do this? The very organization of school inhibits our *own* solidarity, and we too often let the union dominate the conversation about what “improved conditions” really means. In some ways we need to push back on the bread and butter issues just to free up some space for us to do our jobs better in a radical social sense. This idea needs to go beyond union boilerplate and be rooted in the kinds of working class organizations hinted at here.

Either way, I think Marty Glaberman’s piece that looks at Maoism on its own terms is a good place to start developing a critique: http://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/Docs/CX5594-GlabermanMao.htm

Did STO had any contacts with organizations or groups in Germany? To which ones?

I think the anarchist critique that Ken mentions here suggests not only that this was the wrong move but also that it was inherent within Marxism.

So will someone please deal specifically with these questions – (1) which side would they have chosen in Lenin’s shoes? (2) Is the fact that Lenin chose the preservation of the revolution over the very thing that Marx says is the essence of the revolution – the self-emancipation of the working class through its own actions – indicative of something about Marxism?

Ken seems to say, in response to question 1, that he would do what Lenin did (“we have to choose sides”). Even by the standards of the Marxism that stresses “alienation” and “dialectics” over the Stalinist version, this seems a fatal decision. Hence, Lenin is either a Marxist, in which case he wouldn’t crush forms of working-class experimentation, or he is not and would do so. But he is a Marxist, and he did crush the movement of working people to emancipate themselves. So what does that mean?

Especially note the comment by Lang Yan at the bottom.

Why Mao?
Why, in spite of its long list of crimes* and the reality of modern China, does Maoism continue to attract adherents among revolutionaries in the U.S.? Part of the answer is that Maoism represents in many people’s minds the triumph of the will (no reference intended to Leni Riefenstahl’s film of that title).
Marxism came to China around the time of the May Fourth Movement (1919), when Chinese students, enraged at the government’s subservience to foreign powers, turned to the West for new ideas. It arrived as one of many imports; particularly important was the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson argued for the supremacy of the will; here are some quotes from him, picked off the internet: “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” “Always do what you are afraid to do.” “Our greatest glory is in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.” “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” “Passion rebuilds the world for the youth.” “Every revolution was thought first in one man’s mind.”
And the following (especially appealing to many young Americans): “An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
If Emerson stressed reliance on will, Marx discovered the link between communism and the proletariat. Addressing the same questions Mao addressed, and writing at about the same age Mao was when he became a radical, Marx wrote:
Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?
Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.
Maoism was the synthesis of Marxism and Emersonianism, and that was the secret of its triumph in China, a country with a tiny proletariat, and its appeal to a new generation of radicals in the U.S., a country where the proletariat appears to be diminishing in numbers and coherence.
The history of Maoism is well known: After reactionaries crushed the workers’ movement of 1925-27 and slaughtered Communists in the cities, Mao led a faction of the Party to the countryside. There they built a peasant army that, as everyone knows, overthrew the feudal regime and brought the CP to power. I am in awe at Mao’s accomplishment in getting fastidious Chinese students, schoolteachers, librarians (he himself was a librarian), and mandarins, more steeped in class prejudice than any other people on earth, to go and live with peasants and eat out of filthy bowls and pick lice out of their bodies. It was one of the most heroic episodes in history, and one of the greatest revolutions.
Looking back after nearly a century, it is evident now that the dust has settled that Communism in China did not bring about the “complete re-winning of man” but was the banner under which the old, reactionary, patriarchal, feudal society was overthrown and a capitalist society built up in its place. Although Mao and his comrades called themselves, and undoubtedly believed they were, Communists, the revolution they carried out was not a communist revolution, nor could it be, because it was not based in the proletariat, and when it comes to revolution, communist and proletarian are interchangeable terms.
People looking for substitutes for the working class (and consequently infatuated with Maoism) need to ponder that lesson. Sometimes an ounce of theory is worth a ton of action.
Lastly, a word on the “mass line”: The Maoist notion of the “mass line” (from the masses, to the masses) omits, and by omitting denies, the active role of the Marxist organization in refracting the mass movement into its different tendencies and then seeking to clarify the different implications of those tendencies. Instead it substitutes a notion of the Party as a neutral recorder, modestly serving the masses. It is disingenuous, even hypocritical, because while declaring its adherence to the formula “from the masses, to the masses,” it also insists that the Party is the “leading force,” invariably short-circuiting the part where the “masses” make up their own minds. (The same criticism applies to the Zapatista formula “To obey is to lead.”) The view of the Party as the “leading force” is especially popular among those who see no social force that because of its position in society can give shape to the entire movement, and therefore fall back on the Party, an organization of people of no particular class who come together voluntarily on the basis of political agreement, to perform that function.** (The Marxist organization may indeed be the “leading force,” but it has to win its position every day; during the entire period of transition from capitalist society to communism, the period sometimes known as “Socialism,” there can be no other leadership than the soviets, workers’ councils, etc. and even they can only be provisional.) The vanguard party may not be reactionary everywhere—even C.L.R. James acknowledged its value in backward countries; but it is out of place in a country where the working class is “disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.”
*My favorite of Mao’s crimes, which I have seen nowhere in print, comes from a professor of Chinese Studies at Harvard who lived in China for years. He reported that in the last years of his life Mao became infatuated with an 18-year-old female railway worker. He brought her to live with him in the Forbidden City, where she became for a while his intermediary to the outside world. She was the one Communist officials meant when they made statements beginning, “A spokesman for Chairman Mao declared.” According to the professor, the arrangement was an open secret among those in the know. I believe it. The irony is, it may have been the only recorded case in history of the actual dictatorship of the proletariat.
**I maintain that the working class in large-scale industry, transport and communications is the only social force capable of performing this function on a world scale, but that view is of course debatable and moreover its meaning in different situations is not always easy to see. The faction that emerged on top in China after 1927 did not solve the problem of what it meant (if ever they gave it serious consideration). Forty years later, workers in Shanghai declared the Shanghai Commune (a deliberate reference to the Paris Commune, based on direct democracy); shortly afterwards all talk of the Commune ended, and the Party line became the Three-in-one committees, according to which one part of the state administration was to be drawn from the existing cadres, one part from the People’s Liberation Army, and one part from the new forces—in other words, the coopting of the insurgents. Some Italian comrades visited China right after and asked Mao why he abandoned the Commune. His reply: China has 20 million proletarians; how do you expect them to maintain proletarian rule in a country of 680 million peasants? He may have been right. The results are there for all to see. Could total defeat have been worse than what actually transpired? (We could ask the same question about the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt.)

Noel Ignatiev

i found Goldner’s article interesting, but of limited (though not zero)
use. The core of the argument seems to hinge on what Mao did or did not
do, and the history of 20th century China on the level of state policy –
which is fine, but which simply parallels the “focus on the ideology of
top leaders” which Maoists are then criticized for in this piece. Fair
enough, perhaps, as the ideology is named after the man, but from my
conversations with Maoists and ex-Maoists (including some who have gone
on to become left communists and anarchists), it was not Mao’s personal
charms or actions or even his catchy sloganeering that initially
attracted them to Maoism, though these could be grafted on ex post
facto. (To give an example, i think what is wanting in this
understand-Maoism-solely-through-China approach is hinted at in the
sentence, “China supported Philippine dictator Fernando Marcos in his
attempt to crush the Maoist guerrilla movements in that country.”)

This is where i find the article very weak, in its survey of Maoism
outside of China (weak in the First World, both weak and threadbare in
its brief mentions of Maoism in the Third World). Leaving aside the
omissions, distortions, and errors in the cases of France and Germany
(the only two i know anything about), i want to focus on the methodology
in play. Essentially name dropping folks who at one point were Maoists
and at another point were not, and mentioning in passing some of the
worst errors and fuck-ups of Maoists around the world, does not make for
a very useful argument. As a propaganda piece it may do the trick, but
for people who are not predisposed to be anti-Maoist (i.e. for those of
us asking “what is Maoism?” and not “what is wrong with Maoism?”) this
is unsatisfying. Again, perhaps this is par for the course in a quick
survey that is supposed to also serve as a flashing neon caveat emptor,
but without mentioning any of the positives, any of the places where
Maoism might have seemed more liberatory or more useful than other
currents in the left, one is left wondering why so many people became
Maoists – were they just stupid? or ill-intentioned?

To be clear: i think the task of examining, with a suspicious frame of
mind, Maoism (or any other -ism), is completely valid. There are
questions that beg for answers; for instance, in the First World – why
did so many Maoist groups have such trouble coming to grips with gay and
lesbian liberation, even on a shallow level? how did the view of the
Soviet Union as social imperialist segue into a small minority Maoists
rallying to pro-U.S. positions? perhaps most importantly, how is it that
in the early 70s Maoist parties and pre-party formations managed to suck
in so many tens of thousands of committed radicals in a very short
period, only to leave them bitter and disillusioned just years later
when First World Maoism imploded? My guess, though, is that the answers
to these questions have more to do with the political and social
contexts in which they occurred, and the Cultural Revolution only played
a role insofar as it served as an (often barely understood) mental
reference point. An honest answer also requires acknowledging that these
phenomena were not without exceptions – they often were the exception –
and that to people today engaging with Maoism, it makes sense that they
appear as atypical problems from the past, if they even register at all.
So more sociology and less biography would be required to unravel the tale.

From what i have been told, the initial appeal of Maoism in the late
60s/early 70s had much to do with the perceived failings of the New Left
that it emerged from. Similarly, those gains Maoists are making today
seem predicated on the perceived weaknesses or shortcomings of the
broader left. Without providing this context we get a narrative which is
difficult to understand, except as a sorry story of how foolish people are.

Without a more thorough examination of Maoism in each of the countries
mentioned, it is difficult to gain more than a very superficial idea of
the dynamics at play. For instance, what was it in German Maoism so that
mutations occurred that lead into the Green Party on the one hand and
the antideutsche a bit later on – and why in each case was what was
initially a Maoist mutation quickly setting the beat for far greater
numbers of “antiauthoritarians”? What about the distinction between the
mao-spontex and more orthodox Maoists in France, the former having some
cross-over with anarchist and post-situ types? in Quebec, Maoism in the
1970s emerged at least in part as a left turn out of nationalism, with
former FLQ political prisoner Charles Gagnon leading the largest far
left group in the province at the time (En Lutte), and developing a
position that was both revolutionary anti-capitalist and
anti-nationalist. These dynamics can’t be grasped or understood in any
real way just by mentioning them, but nor can the Maoist movements in
various countries be discredited by simply mentioning Bob Avakian or
Jean Quan.

Among younger people, outside of Quebec, many if not most Maoists in
white North America are former anarchists, or at least formerly part of
the anarchist scene. i think the attraction these people have towards
Maoism is likely despite, not because of, the checkered history of
actual Maoists parties and organizations here. It also probably has much
to do with the soft hegemony of a form of soft anarchism amongst
activists (especially young white college-educated or -attending
activists) in the radical left, and the weaknesses that flow from both
that hegemony and from anarchist ideology itself. To grasp the nature of
the phenomenon i think one must start by conceding that Maoism has
continued to evolve and branch out in various forms, often nationally
distinct, since Mao died in 1976, and in ways that can only really be
evaluated on a case by case basis, by looking at the organizing work but
also at the theoretical production.

As is often the case in analyzing political traditions, starting from a
perspective of simply collecting evidence to show that something is
rotten-to-the-core is not the must useful approach, though i understand
that for propaganda purposes it is sometimes necessary.

Kersplebedeb

“My second story concerns the Communist Party of China. After reactionaries crushed the workers’ movement of 1925–27 and slaughtered Communists in the cities, Mao Tse-tung led a faction of the Party to the countryside. There they built a peasant army that, as everyone knows, overthrew the feudal regime and brought the CP to power. I am in awe at Mao’s accomplishment in getting fastidious Chinese students, schoolteachers, librarians (he himself was a librarian), and mandarins, more steeped in traditions of class superiority than any other people on earth, to go and live with diseased peasants and eat out of filthy bowls and pick lice out of their bodies. It was one of the most heroic episodes in history, and one of the greatest revolutions. But—and this the point of my story—although Mao and his comrades called themselves, and undoubtedly believed they were, Communists, it was not a communist revolution, nor could it be, because it was not based in the proletariat, and when it comes to revolution, communist and proletarian are interchangeable terms.
“People looking for substitutes for the working class (and those currently infatuated with Maoism) need to ponder that lesson.”

That position is congruent with Marty Glaberman’s argument in his essay “Mao as a Dialectician,” which I included in the Dialectics class curriculum. To both I answer: Karl Marx had more imagination than that, a lesson George Rawick taught me. In an 1877 letter to a Russian journal Marx wrote (in French, translated here):

“In order that I might be qualified to estimate the economic development in Russia today, I learned Russian and then for many years studied the official publications and others bearing on this subject. I have arrived at this conclusion: If Russia continues to pursue the path she has followed since 1861, she will lose the finest chance ever offered by history to a nation, in order to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.”

What might Marx have intended to suggest? If the emancipation of Russia’s serfs in 1861 offered history’s finest opportunity to avoid capitalist development, it must have presented an opportunity for something better, freer, more egalitarian, less prone to crisis and collapse. Would we hesitate to call that socialism or communism, regardless of which social groups built it?

The concluding paragraph of Marx’s letter stressed that his historical summary of bourgeois development in Europe is not a universally applicable formula:

“In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labor power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labor, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage laborers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former ‘poor whites’ in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.”

Perhaps revolutionary China also has missed history’s chance to avoid the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime — an opportunity presented by Mao’s revolution. In the unlikely event they might study Marx’s writings seriously, anyone infatuated with Maoism might draw inspiration from these quotes, likening them to Mao’s warnings against the capitalist road.

My personal infatuation is more frivolous. I enjoy reading the Chief Inspector Chen detective stories by Qiu Xioalong. Chen is a loyal cop and a poet in Shanghai, solving murder mysteries and predicaments that threaten to embarrass the party leaders. He and his colleagues view each assignment through the prism of post-revolutionary politics.

Ken Lawrence

“Many STO members were unable to successfully challenge the ‘heavies’ and this inability sometimes led to frustration and at other times to accusations of one kind or another. Nonetheless the ‘heavies’ not only faced this situation squarely through the dialectics training generally speaking, but also in stark particularity with a study question from the dialectics syllabus: ‘How does the “average person” retain his/her views in the face of a superior intellect?’ (Urgent Tasks, No. 7, “How to Think,” p.26). Ken Lawrence’s answer to this question in one of the early dialectics sessions was, ‘on faith.’ And therein lies the rub, since taking anything ‘on faith’ was anathema to the dialectics training itself and to STO’s staunch anti-Stalinism.”

I wasn’t preaching the gospel according to Matthew (“O ye of little faith . . .”) as other Marxist groups did. I was quoting Antonio Gramsci, whose insight was a pole apart from holy writ:

“Consider for a moment the intellectual position of the average person. He has been shaped by opinions, convictions, some criteria of discrimination, and certain rules of behavior. Any ideological opponent who is intellectually superior can argue his position better than the man can, defeat him logically, and so on. What should our man do, change his convictions because he can’t win the given discussion? But then he might be changing his opinions once a day if he should happen to meet superior opponents. This he cannot do, and won’t do. Therefore what is the basis of the philosophy of the average man, and especially his ethics? Undoubtedly the most important element is not reason but faith. But faith in whom and in what? Faith in that social group to which he belongs and who think as vaguely as he does; the average man feels that so many people cannot be as wrong as his argumentative opponent would like him to believe. It is true, thinks our man, he himself is not capable of winning the argument, but there is someone in his group who can, and in fact our man remembers hearing such a coherent impressive argument for his beliefs that he was, and has remained, convinced. He may not remember the argument concretely, and he couldn’t repeat it, but he knows it was true because he heard it and was convinced. The permanent reason for the permanence of a conviction is to have been strikingly convinced once.” [my emphasis]

Gramsci drew two lessons from that observation:

“1. To repeat unceasingly and tirelessly one’s own arguments, though, of course, varying the literary form. Repetition is the most efficient didactic method of working on the popular mind.
“2. To work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of ever greater strata of the population. This entails developing groups of intellectuals of a new type, who rise directly from the people yet remain in contact with them, forming as it were the ‘ribs’ corseting the mass.
“If this second condition is fulfilled, the ‘ideological panorama’ of an epoch is truly changed.”

Despite Gramsci’s awkward sexist simile, that was also STO’s ambitious aim, and my reason for quoting it.

Ken

Lessons of the American Revolutionary Left of the 1970s

Dan La Botz

Book review of: Michael Staudenmaier. Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986. Oakland: AK Press, 2012. Bibliography, index. 387 pages. Paperback, $19.95.

Michael Staudenmaier’s Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, recently published by the radical AK Press, is a thoroughly engaging critical history of one of the most interesting revolutionary socialist groups that emerged from the radical upsurge of the 1960s and 1970s. While Staudenmaier clearly admires STO, many of whose members he knew and several of whom were his friends, this is far from being a hagiographic work. The author presents the group with all its foibles, it many frustrations and its ultimate failures, without ever letting us forget that what he admires about this group was its attempt to develop socialist theory while also being deeply committed to organizing and struggle. It is not surprising that this book is being widely read by many of the new non-state socialist groups such as Advance the Struggle and the Black Orchid Collective that have arisen out of the social movements of the last decade and become visible through their work in the Occupy movement, for today they are striving to establish a theory and practice just as STO did—and just as many other groups from a full range of left perspectives did—in the 1970s. While there are now a pile of books about the party-building efforts of the 1960s and 70s, Staudenmaier’s is the most interesting one I’ve encountered.[1]

Perhaps I like this book so much in part because I lived in Chicago in the 1970s and knew a few of the STO members and always liked them. I was a member of the International Socialists (IS) and some of our members worked in the International Harvester tractor plant with some STO members and our two groups often collaborated, and sometimes differed, on workplace and community issues that arose there. Though STO formed part of the New Communist Movement and the IS had come out of the Trotskyist tradition, our groups overlapped in many of our political positions and in our work. We shared not only labor and community organizing experiences, but also found ourselves over the years involved in the same movements for international solidarity with the initial revolution in Iran in 1979 and with the Central American national liberation movements of the 1980s, and we shared preoccupations with the issues of African American struggles for civil rights and social justice and women’s fights for equality and liberation. Like STO, we in the IS wrestled with the problems that arise in a political organization from young people’s passionate personal relationships, with the issue of parenting and childcare, with the problems of leadership “heavies” who often seemed to make decisions without adequate consultation with the ranks. I think that anyone who was active in the left of the 1970s in almost any group would recognize themselves in parts of the STO story, and that new groups arising today will profit from Staudenmaier’s thoughtful examination of STO’s history.

STO’s Theory

The Sojourner Truth Organization was founded in Chicago in 1969 and Chicago remained its headquarters throughout its history, though in the 1970s and 80s the name was also applied to a network of organizations in cities mostly in the Midwest affiliated with and largely led by STO in Chicago. Several initial founders, who remained its leaders throughout most of its history, came out of Communist Party backgrounds. Don Hamerquist had been an outstanding young leader of the Communist Party who some believed would succeed its longtime chairman Gus Hall, but after attempting “to lead a coup in the party” and failing, he quit. Noel Ignatin (later known as Noel Ignatiev) had also been a Communist, but had left the CP with Ted Allen and Harry Haywood to found the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (the POC). Carol Travis was the daughter of Bud Travis, a Communist Party leader in the seizure and occupation of the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, by autoworkers in the strike of 1936-37. Many of the STO founders had also been members of Students for a Democratic Society (sds) and one had been a member of the Black Panthers. While STO formed part of the New Communist Movement, largely made up of Maoist organizations, it was from early on influenced by the C.L.R. James who had come out of the Trotskyist tradition. Then too, Ken Lawrence had come out of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) experience, and brought the syndicalist idea into the group. Though its initial founding core had one African American and one Latina woman, both soon left the group and throughout most of its history STO was an all white organization.

What STO’s founding members had in common was a desire to build what they understood to be a Leninist organization based on independent workplace organizing and a belief that to do so they would have to challenge the racism of white workers. The notion of the importance of organizing workers had its roots in Marx and Lenin, but it had taken on a new sense of urgency and possibility as a result of the May-June strike in Paris in 1968, the “hot autumn” of strikes in Italy in 1969, and the massive strike wave in the United States in 1970. Unlike other groups in the New Communist Movement, the International Socialists, the Maoist “parties,” and other groups that had gone into the workplace to build rank-and-file or reform caucuses within the unions, STO argued that it was necessary to build completely “independent workers’ organizations” that would not be part of unions and would not contest to control union structures and offices. The theory of independent workers’ organizations (or workers councils as they were sometimes called), principally crafted by Don Hamerquist, was one of the two distinctive theoretical and strategic ideas developed by STO.

The other idea that STO developed and popularized was “white skin privilege,” a theory first suggested by Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen (not an STO member) in a paper called “The White Blindspot” originally written for a debate in sds in 1967. (Actually Allen had used the term in 1965 in a piece commemorating John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry; the kernel of the idea came from W.E.B. DuBois Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880.) White supremacy, they argued, was largely founded on white skin privilege, a set of real social and material benefits that accrued to those deemed to be white, from preferential treatment by government and police to first hired and last fired in the workplace. White skin privilege was seen as the principal obstacle to unity between black and white workers. STO argued that in the course of labor and social struggles, whites would have to repudiate their white skin privileges and show support for the struggles of African Americans and Latinos, and that by doing so, unity between white workers and workers of color would make possible a united proletarian struggle to overthrow capitalism.

Hamerquist, who helped to develop these theories about white workers’ racism and about the nature of the union, brought in the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci whose then recently translated Prison Notebooks used the concept of “hegemony” rather than simply the state’s monopoly of force to explain bourgeois rule. (Gramsci later became enormously popular among leaders of the more social democratic New Left, who used his concept of hegemony and the “war of position” rather than a “war of maneuver” to justify their turn to the Democratic Party. And, of course, Gramsci became enormously popular in academia where his writings were used for cultural studies rather than cultural or social revolution.) Hamerquist argued that bourgeois hegemony was exercised over the working class through the labor bureaucracy and through white racism. He developed the concept of “dual consciousness” (not to be confused with W.E.B. DuBois’ use of that term), meaning that workers tended to have in their minds a bourgeois and a proletarian consciousness, and the job of revolutionaries was to help them in strengthening their proletarian consciousness. (In the political tradition from which I come, we never had such a Manichaean notion of workers’ consciousness, but tended to recognize that most people of whatever class have a “mixed consciousness”—our minds made up of residues of beliefs and concepts from our family, religious training, grammar school education, the world of teenage peers, the bombardment from commercial advertising, and politicians appeals to patriotism—the challenge being to come to think clearly about the world—Marxism helps—so that they can make intelligent choices for a revolutionary alternative.)

While independent workers’ organizations and white skin privilege were the two key ideas that distinguished the STO from other left organizations, during the 1970s and into the 1980s, the group also developed other positions that differentiated it from the New Communist milieu out of which it had come. During the 1970s Hamerquist and Ignatin wrote important documents breaking with Stalinism: they repudiated Stalin, they rejected the notion that Khrushchev or his successors had reformed the Soviet Union, and they rejected the idea that China or Cuba were socialist states, arguing that all were state capitalist. No doubt the influence of C.L.R. James had been important in leading them to this conclusion. They also rejected the Stalinist forms of party organization, arguing that most of what the left called Leninism were actually undemocratic structures and practices that would better be called Stalinism.

Finally, STO had throughout its history a very healthy concern about the relationship between a cadre organization or a political tendency attempting to build a revolutionary party and the movements, usually small but sometimes mass movements, in which it worked. Later in the 1970s and early 80s, STO would characterize this question between what we call in my tradition the issue of “party and class” as the issue of “autonomy.” This notion of autonomy is perhaps what Staudenmaier values most in the STO experience, though as he would be the first to admit, nowhere did the group succeed in either adequately explaining the theory or in working it out in practice. Autonomy was for STO, as it has been the other groups on the left, a slippery concept expressing the high ideal of freedom of thought and action for a social group, but constantly entangled in the questions of organizational structure, leadership, and program.

Workplace Organizing

Staudenmaier provides a useful chronology of the STO’s activities: from 1969-1975, workplace organizing; from 1976-1980, anti-imperialist solidarity; from 1980-1986, tendency building and direct action. During the first period of workplace organizing, STO grew to fifty members in the Chicago area, many of those members engaged in organizing in factories in Chicago and for a while in steel mills in Gary, Indiana. In those workplaces STO often put out factory bulletins with names like Talk Back and Breakout! as well as its newspaper Insurgent Worker. STO, and the several lawyers in the group, also became involved in assisting workers in plants where it did not have members. While STO was sometimes involved in heroic and inspiring struggles, as Staudenmaier’s account makes clear, the group’s labor organizing activities seldom led to the formation of stable groups in workplaces. In part this was due to STO’s refusal to run for union office—though it did sometimes tacitly support reform candidates in the unions.

Though many STO members were in unionized workplaces, the union was not an arena of struggle for the group and consequently it could not turn its workplace struggles into institutional victories that might have changed the character of the unions. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that in many of the larger workplaces in Chicago, such as the Stewart-Warner plant, STO was only one of several left groups—from the Communist Party to the New American Movement from Maoists to Trotskyists—that had organizers in the plant, often with their own bulletins and newspaper. STO’s refusal to permit its members to run for office led to splits in the organization, as several of its best organizers, such as its leaders of the Latino caucus at the International Harvester plant, left the organization. Nowhere did STO succeed in creating the independent workers’ organization which stood at the center of its political theory.

All of the revolutionary socialist groups on the left in the 1970s were attempting to build a revolutionary party out of their work in industrial workplaces. The STO experience might be compared to that of other leftist groups, mostly Maoists, that ran their members for election as union steward, built local union caucuses, and participated in broader union movements, such as Steelworkers Fight Back, a caucus that supported Ed Sadlowski’s campaign for president of the United Steel Workers (USW) in 1977. Local union and national campaigns gave activists an opportunity to talk not only about shop floor issues, but also about the large issues facing the union, the industry and the society. When workers found their shop floor work had an impact on union policy and relations to the employer, they achieved power, as well as a greater sense of their own power, and often also improved their wages, working conditions, and benefits. The most successful among the left organizations in such union work was IS, which was involved in initiating such caucuses in the United Auto Workers, the Communications Workers of America, as well as participating in such caucuses in the American Federation of Teachers and the USW. Most significant of these experiences was the IS’s role in establishing Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a long standing caucus in the Teamsters union.[2] The IS also initiated Labor Notes, the union reform newspaper and education center with biannual conventions that attracted a thousand union activists each year. While the IS initiated these projects, they were never conceived of as socialist projects and from the beginning were independent (autonomous) organizations with their own leadership, organization and resources, and programs. The collapse of the social movements of the 1970s (among African Americans, Latinos, women and students) and the end of the recent period of labor militancy with the recessions of 1974-75 and 1979-80, accompanied by the country’s rightwing administration under Ronald Reagan and depoliticization of the society, made the task of relating labor work to socialist ideas and organization a challenge for all of those on the left, with no simple answers.

Throughout that first five years of labor organizing, STO had constant interactions with African American and Latino workers and leftists, but its white skin privilege theory proved of little use in building alliances between white workers and workers of color, while STO could never decide if it should recruit people of color to its own organization, or urge them to join an African American or Latino socialist group. STO literature often challenged white workers to give up their white skin privilege and to support the demands of African American and Latino workers, but in practice it was not always clear what this would actually mean. Most other left groups viewed STO’s white skin privilege theory as liberal and moralistic; in any case, it proved no guide to action. Based on Staudenmaier’s account, African American and Latino organizations and leaders appear to have been mystified by STO’s theory and practice. The few African American workers who joined STO during this period left in the splits. By the mid-1970s, STO was reduced to six members.

Anti-Imperialist Work

In 1976 STO decided that the economic and political climate was at a “lull,” suggesting that workplace organizing would not be possible for some time. The group therefore should turn its attention to theory, education, and work in the anti-imperialist movements. (This is very similar to the notion of the “downturn” developed by Tony Cliff of the Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain in 1978 and then the International Socialist Organization of the United States shortly afterwards.) So in 1977 Ken Lawrence developed the STO’s mandatory “Dialectics Course” with reading from Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Luckacs, C.L.R. James and Mark Twain (yes, that’s the same Mark Twain you’re thinking of). STO members would take a week off work and political activities to go out into the country for these sessions in which all members participated, first as students and then as instructors. The “Dialectics Course” helped to give the STO a reputation as one of the most intellectual and theoretical groups on the left.

Most of the group’s work at this time was in support for anti-imperialist struggles, particularly the struggle of Puerto Rico for independence. While STO worked at first with the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) a Marxist-Leninist party in Puerto Rico and the United States closely aligned with Cuba). STO eventually, however, became part of the National Liberation Movement (MLN), a collection of left groups that supported the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), a Puerto Rican group that set off 120 bombs in Chicago and New York between 1974 and 1983. STO members believed that they had to support the Puerto Ricans struggle against imperialism, including the armed struggle.

While STO sometimes differed with the FALN and other Puerto Rican groups, it would not make its political difference public because of the repression that the armed movement and other Puerto Rican organizations were facing. Consequently, STO’s own political positions became completely lost in its unconditional and apparently uncritical support of the MLN and FALN. Also, like some other left groups, STO took a position of support for the revolution in Iran, including initially backing the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who ultimately brought the rightwing Islamic dictatorship. Similarly, STO found itself becoming an unconditional and uncritical supporter of Central American revolutionary movements during the period of its participation in the solidarity groups such as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). Throughout the years of this work, Staudenmaier explains, STO’s member worked frantically, rushing from one crisis to another, from one organization to another, until in the frenetic race from one emergency to another some in the group felt that they lost sight of their own identity and objectives.

Tendency Building and Direct Action

After five years of work in the anti-imperialist movements, STO changed its direction once again, this time to tendency building and an emphasis on direct action. STO had had a wealth of organizing experience, and despite being unable to point to many significant victories, its core ideas—independent workers’ organizations and white skin privilege—had become attractive to a number of organizations in cities in the Midwest and in some other areas of the country, most notably Denver, Colorado, and Portland, Oregon, though there was also an attempt at organizing in Mississippi. Led by STO, these local collectives now put their energies into the anti-war movement that had developed against Ronald Reagan’s wars in Central America and into the new anti-nuclear movement led by the Clamshell Alliance. STO was attracted to these movements because of their commitment to direct action, though appalled by their pacifism and opposition to violence, and frustrated by the middle class, white composition of the movements.

The attempt to build a national tendency eventually failed for several reasons. Since its founding in 1969 STO had been plagued by what Staudenmaier calls “informal hierarchies,” that is, a small group of the original founders—Hamerquist, Ignatin, Travis, and Lawrence, and a couple of others—dominated the group whether or not they held formal office. They tended to develop the positions, write the documents, maintain contacts with local and national organizations, and determine the course of the group. STO failed throughout its history to establish democratic structures and processes and that both undermined its own functioning and proved an obstacle to establishing a national tendency. Then too, STO’s core theoretical concepts—independent workers’ organizations and white skin privilege—seemed to be unrelated to the group’s work in the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements in the 1980s, work which had little to do with the workplace or with winning white workers from their racism. Finally, demography was a real factor: many of the group’s members were aging, a few were parents with responsibilities for their children, and others, having left the industrial workplace, were moving on to other careers. (Ignatin, for example, born in 1940, turned 45 in 1985, and left the group a year before it died.) While STO had been interested in building an international tendency in the 1980s together with the autonomia groups in Italy and Germany, the debilitation of its own based in the United States made this impossible.

After STO withered away in 1986, several of its leaders went on to have interesting jobs and professions in other areas. Carole Travis, breaking with STO’s historic opposition to taking union office, became the president of United Auto Workers Local 719 at the GM Electromotive plant, serving three terms (nine years), and later went on to work for the Service Employees International Union as Director of the Illinois State Council for thirteen years. Most recently she participated in the Occupy movement in both Zuccotti Park and Oakland. Michael Goldfield became a professor of labor history at Wayne State University in Detroit focusing his research on workers’ movements and labor, and in particular on the failure of the labor unions to organize the South. Noel Ignatin became a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art, best known for his book How the Irish Became White and for his journal Race Traitor. The Sojourner Truth Organization’s survivors and successors have put its digital archives on the net, with as complete a collection as possible of its journals, newspaper, and pamphlets. Many of the former STO members retain their revolutionary socialist worldview and continue to contribute to movements as they have in some cases for fifty years.

The Lessons of the Experience

Sojourner Truth Organization represented only one of dozens of groups and involved only hundreds of the thousands of leftists who in the period between the late 1960s and 1980s were involved in attempts to build revolutionary organizations. American economic and political power, police repression, and the difficulties of developing a political theory and practice appropriate to the United States led all of those efforts to fail. In 1979-1981 most of the Maoist groups collapsed; the Socialist Workers Party, the largest Trotskyist group, after a belated and brief attempt at entering industry and the unions, evolved into a Castroite sect; the International Socialists split three ways between 1978 and 1979, and the New American Movement majority gave up its revolutionary vocation and merged with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) to form the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA). The STO suffered the common fate that befell what we can call the Generation of 1968.

After one has finished reading Staudenmaier’s book three points stand out in my mind. First, STO never succeeded in developing the democratic structures and processes necessary for an effective political organization. Second, STO’s two core theories—white skin privilege and independent workers’ organizations—never proved a guide to action. They did not accurately describe the nature of workers’ movements in the labor unions with their particular relationship to capital, nor did they adequately capture the nature of American racism in such a way as to guide the work of activists. Third, STO’s healthy concern about the autonomy of mass movements, workers’ organizations, and the struggles of African Americans and Latinos never emerged as a clear theory of any sort. While it always considered itself Leninist, STO never succeeded in describing the relationship between a revolutionary organization and the way it should relate to the movements in which it operates.

What lay behind the STO’s white skin privilege and union abstention theories? I suspect that STO’s theories were rooted in their attempts to grapple with the strengths and weaknesses of the Communist Party out of which either they or their parents had come. The white skin privilege theory expressed their profound frustration with the widespread racism of white workers—which had become so palpable South and North during the Civil Rights movement and the War in Vietnam—and which proved so obdurate. The Communists—despite the remarkable work they had done (not without its serious problems created by the vicissitudes of the Stalinist era, but better than everyone else’s), despite their often brilliant and courageous African American cadres, and despite their remarkable and also courageous white fighters against racism—had not been able to turn the corner on the issue in a big way on a national scale—organizing the South being the big unfinished job as Goldfield has pointed out—though they did a remarkable job in various places in the CIO period. The race problem in America is just so terrible and so intractable. And then, of course, the Communists Party had by the late 1930s become tied to a strategy of trying to ally with or to penetrate the union bureaucracy, a policy which had further distorted its own Stalinist politics. So STO leaders like Hamerquist, Ignatin, and Travis attempted to think their way out of these problems by developing critical theories of white racism and the nature of the labor bureaucracy, which is to their credit. But in the end, those two theories, this self-definition, failed to serve as a guide to action and also became so important to the group’s sense of its unique identity, that theory formed a barrier to practice, that is, to mass work, recruitment, and ultimately to the group’s survival.

Notes

[1] Others include: Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (New York: Verso, 2002); A. Belden Field, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York: Praeger, 1988); Fred Ho et al., Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America (AK Press, 2000); Milton Fisk, Socialism from Below in the United States: The Origins of the International Socialist Organization. Fisk’s book is really a history of the International Socialists (IS) up to the founding of the ISO. There are also many memoirs of revolutionary activists of the period now available.

[2] Dan La Botz, “The Tumultuous Teamsters of the 1970s,” in Aaron Brenner et al., eds., Rank and File Rebellion: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below during the Long 1970s (New York: Verso, 2010). See also Dan La Botz, Rank and File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (New York: Verso, 1990).

How do the actions of the US FED in maintaining open-ended currency swap lines with the ECB and offering below market interest rates to the ECB for the loans of dollars square with this notion of a so-called “currency war”?

I mean, if I were chairman of the Fed, involved in some vast alliance with Wall Street, the New York Times, George Soros etc in a brewing “currency war” with the euro, and I knew the ECB needed dollars to settle transactions conducted in dollars, I would charge the ECB an arm and a leg and its first born children as the vig on the loan, know what I mean?

If the source includes FNMA, and FMAC–uhh.. technically not as their status allows them to remain “off balance sheet”– plus, the entire US mortgage market was, at its peak may $12 trillion, so I sure would like to see the references.

Recently on Twitter a Paulista rhetorically asked what happened to all
the liberals who were outraged about illegal war and warrantless
wiretaps under Bush. She got a response from a Democrat who asked “How
dare you try to turn us against our President?” and accused her of
“sowing seeds of dissension.”

Your argument that because a majority in the Mayor’s office, PD and local
corporate mgt are black, structural racism is no longer relevant,
strikes me at best as a stretch. The fact of an increasingly
multi-racial ruling class and enforcement apparatus surely increases the
importance of class considerations relative to race, but it
doesn’t mean that even a multiracial police apparatus can’t still treat
black and white populations differently for structural reasons.

Enough of that for now. Movements hardly spring forth from good organizing, and even less so from none at all. I wonder what the role of the SAI would be when students do erupt in anger–will the leadership attempt to toss nets over them, reign them in to one of your weekly meetings? That is the real question at hand, and one in which neither you nor the insurrectionists will never be able to adequately answer.

Did anyone even bother bring up that while NYU and Columbia are UNTAXED by the city of NY [and gigantic landlords], CUNY tuition climbs and that CUNY had managed to remain tuition-free during the Great Depression?

Here’s where the formlessness, the “autonomy” of OWS like actions really falls apart.

Nobody knows why the fuck they are doing anything.

“To be clear… we are NOT against transitional demands. But we do believe that such demands – even where we ask the existing order to grant some things – must enhance the struggle for greater autonomy of ordinary people and not be merely illusions.
When people struggle for transitional demands, instead of lobby for them by relying on electoral politics… the demands should clarify what social classes leads the mass democratic struggle. Transitional demands must be economic gains but also an expansion of the power to directly govern of the working people, mothers, the wageless and unemployed.
“…it is crucial to distinguish between participatory democracy grafted on to a republic…and direct democracy where no professional governing classes have claims to legitimacy and are abolished. But their abolition will only be real if ordinary people in their councils and assemblies not merely protest but conduct themselves as if they have perspectives and proposals of their own and are prepared to carry them out (we might call this an enlarged concept of citizenship).
“…As we begin to formulate transitional demands that underscore disproportionate unemployment, police brutality and incarceration of people of color – and make these demands on Mayor Kasim Reed’s government – we should also do something else.
An excellent transitional demand should be to call on the NAACP, SCLC, and Rainbow Push and its leadership to divest from Big Business sponsorship – if we want to get Big Business out of politics, why not prioritize getting Big Business out of freedom movement politics?
…When is OA going to tap into the true Black radical tradition in Atlanta?…
An Occupy Atlanta movement that is not bogged down by white guilt, and the opportunistic Black middle class it serves, will make transitional proposals, that recognized African Americans as having the dominant role from above and below, in Atlanta city politics. A Direct Democratic United Front in Atlanta cannot include both Black capitalists and Black workers (just as it cannot include both the masters and servants of any people).”

I hope it will be of some use. I would like to address one concern I see in your argument, however. I think the point I was trying to get across is that any extension of demands which, while have been at best resistant to co-optation into the capitalist system, necessarily means the end of the Occupy movement. The union form is already enmeshed in capitalist social relations, and although that does not preclude that some sort of struggle take place within them, workers know that such limited struggles are limited by the unions themselves in addition to the capitalists. In light of capitalist decadence, I see really no worker struggle pushing forward any union (be it the IWW or something else), but rather having to go outside it as we’ve already seen in the events in Egypt and in Wisconsin. You can place as many demands on an ever-growing list, but no amount of calls for a general strike or the abolition of wage labor will make people confront the issue of production.

Best,

KA

a) the need for an alternative program

and

b) the racial question

Regarding a), I liked this:

“They don’t understand that you don’t get the loyalty of the masses by telling them what they already know at their most conservative. The OA spokespeople never made a press statement asking people in their workplaces and neighborhoods to take matters into their own hands where they labored and lived.”

Regarding b), this was a particularly succinct statement:

“The Oakland events, especially the turn to the Port and dockworkers (however few as a result of containerization) we think pointed the way forward. But what we are fighting in Atlanta is not fear of Jim Crow police but the inability to confront soundly the Black police and Black corporate political establishment. ”

This brings a) and b) together:

“Neither group condemned the President or Mayor who were people of color Democrats. No local demands were made on the Black led city government.”

The alternative program that you describe is kind of vague – worker/community self-management through councils. This program would seem to circumvent the whole aspect of politics that engages the status quo, and instead focus exclusively on creating dual power. Yet the quote above about local demands suggests that you may be open to certain reforms as a legitimate component of the overall strategy.

In my personal opinion, we need the right mix of both challenging the establishment for the right reforms AND (mainly) building the bases that evolve into true dual power institutions. Its hard to do both without falling off some kind of slippery slope, but I think this is the challenge at hand.

Towards the beginning of this piece, you state:

“The goal of the 99% Declaration is to have a national convention of delegates which passes a program of transitional demands palatable to, but slightly to the left of, Obama, such as healthcare by a single payer system and restoration of Glass-Steagall—laws which assume the capitalist state can regulate Big Business.”

Are you critical of the idea of transitional demands in general, or just these particular demands (which don’t seem to fit in the category of “transitional” to me, but maybe thats a semantic misunderstanding).

What are the demands you elude to that might be made on these governments? How would these be different from the “transitional” demands you criticized at the top of your article?

Thank you for a very concise, honest, and hard-hitting piece.

Solidarity from Oakland!

The demands have to be something other than “honor the original contract” or “No to union on union scabbing”:

What can be developed as social demands?

JG.

JG

Workers in Wisconsin and across the nation are at a cross roads. Either we continue down the road of dependence on the Democratic Party, political lobbyists, court-rulings and reliance on union leaders, who offer concessions instead of fight, who tell us to: “share the pain” instead of taking actions designed to make the capitalists pay for their crisis; or, we open a new road of working class independent action to make the bosses pay!

The Democrats and union tops will have us “put down the placards and pick up the clipboards” they intend to channel the masses energy off the streets and into the electoral arena and courts. A recall campaign will be coupled with mobilization for Democratic candidates and a demoralizing wait for court cases to be adjudicated. This is a dead end strategy which leaves resolution of the crisis in the hands of the capitalist’s institutions and capitalist politicians. For a solution to the crisis in favor of the working class a strategy of self activity and political independence is required.

The outcome of this struggle is decisive for the entire working class. Either the workers’ movement will prevail, and based on this victory a sense of revitalization will swell the ranks of labor with a new spirit to turn the tide, or the capitalists will be victorious, and will take their campaign from state to state and pick the unions to the bone, crushing the working class. For big capital, this is a nationwide attack; for the working class, the response must be nationwide as well. The Democrats could not even deliver the Employee Free Choice Act no way can they protect our right to collective bargaining.

Break with the Democrats:
To resolve the economic and political crisis in the interest of the working class we must organize from the bottom up (factory/office/job-site committees), we need to develop new leaders who will prepare for general strikes. As a recall campaign is already underway we need to reject the Democrats who expect our support and instead run independent labor candidates, build working class political independence and lay the foundation for a fighting workers’/labor party.

The old strategy is one of class collaboration between labor and the Democrats have long tied the American worker to the imperialist project, pitting the American workers against the workers of the world. Labor allied with the Democrats has, for over a century, endorsed imperialist interventions supported and planned on a bi-partisan basis by Wall Street politicians who took labor for granted, promised us crumbs while militarily plundering and exploiting the resources of the world. An alternative strategy which breaks the stranglehold of class collaboration, identifies that workers’ interests are not the same as Wall Streets’ and opens the road to international workers’ solidarity joint actions.
Our task: to exploit the cracks in consciousness
The consciousness of the working class in America is changing under the pressure of deteriorating material conditions. Old prejudices and illusions in the American dream are daily being crushed under the weight of unfulfilled expectations. Workers are starting to question the efficacy of the strategy and tactics of the current crop of labor fakers. As workers find that their dependence on the Democrats, even coupled with daily protests, candle light vigils and pajama parties in the Capitol Rotunda, have not produced the desired results, they will be looking for working solutions.

The general strike and a system of transitional demands is our answer; with it we fight for control of the work and the workplace, as the bosses have shown they are no longer capable either of administering the work process, or of guaranteeing the product – which, in the case of public work, is providing services (education, health & safety, roads, transit, home care etc.) to the people. WE DO THE WORK! WE SHOULD CONTROL IT!

Advocacy for a general strike, today, exposes the incapability of the existing union leaderships to guide the working class to victory. The call for the general strike puts them on notice that we know they do not have a strategy or tactics that can resolve the crisis in the interest of the working class. Our strategy is to take every step with the masses toward greater and greater self expression of the historic interest of the working class. The tactics we use must rely on workers’ self organization, united front action, and the international workers solidarity needed to win. The emergence of a general strike poses the question of which class should run society: the capitalists or the workers. As the crisis becomes more acute and it becomes apparent that capital can not resolve the crisis.

Confronting old limitations and roadblocks
The path to victory in Wisconsin is via general strike, but we must not ignore what it will take to win. In order to win, ties to the Democrats and the entrenched labor fakers need to be broken. A new militant rank and file leadership committed to class struggle methods and class independence must be forged, must fight for and win leadership. Without ousting the bureaucracy and reclaiming the unions as democratic unions run by the most militant workers, the general strike will flounder and be smashed.
All the hurdles in the way need to be consciously considered by mass assemblies of workers and popular forums, run on the principles of workers’ democracy. The task at hand is to convene and turn solidarity actions into popular/worker/labor assemblies that meet everywhere to plan and prepare for a nationwide indefinite general strike. Local assemblies should delegate strike committees of the activists in the ranks to go to all worksites to organize meetings, help establish rank-and-file committees, caucuses, and networks, and enlist support for the strike to build locally and regionally before setting the date for the big one. Our strategy is workers’ self-activity and solidarity! Such organizational developments are the very foundational organizations needed for the formation of a workers’ government that can administer the economy in the common interests of the masses. The union busters have not hesitated to use their ‘nuclear option.’ We workers must not hesitate to use ours! Solidarity Forever!

HUMANIST WORKERS FOR REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM
e-mail: hw4rs@yahoo.com
March 2011 Labor Donated

I noticed a tension between the program offered in this article and the one offered in Garvey’s excellent “Rethinking Educational Failure” in the same issue. Here, Goldner calls for “universal outreach” among various sectors of the U.S. working class, including racialized sectors. From this I gather that Black, Latino, and white workers (among others), need to reach out to each other so that they might be forged into a class-for-itself. In Garvey’s article, he insists that teachers under attack in Wisconsin and elsewhere need to express solidarity with the communities they teach in (particularly Black communities), before they can or should expect to be supported by these communities when they themselves are under attack by tools such as Wisconsin’s Governor Walker.

These programs appear similar, but they are not. Garvey suggests something much more profound than white workers reaching out to Black and Latino workers, for example. He seems to argue that public sector workers (teachers, prison guards, cops, etc.) must take responsibility for their own role in reproducing racial inequalities in education, incarceration, and police brutality (among other public sector functions)–by which I take him to mean they must work to abolish them. Further, he seems to suggest that addressing these inequalities is a _precondition_ for racial alliances among the working class.

This seems much harder than universal outreach. It also seems like there is no such program in the works among the left in Wisconsin, or elsewhere. Yet it also seems desperately necessary.

Am I right to read this tension? Perhaps this is related to the “sharp debate” within the editorial board on this matter.

Thanks again for this issue of IN.

The concept is simple enough: a logical ordering of programmatic points that indicate the practical path from the minimum to the maximum program. That’s it, really. So, for example in the U.S., a program should begin by addressing the reality of the international migrant workers, mostly Mexican, presently contained in the political form of the immigrant rights movement. Through its various semi-legal and legal gradations as “Latino”, this sector forms a crucial part of the North American proletariat.

It should also be noted that the U.S. radical right continuously insists upon impaling itself on this “Latino bogeyman”. In the recent mid-term U.S. elections the key electoral defeats of the radical right were experienced by the most “Latino bashing” campaigns, notably in Nevada and Colorado, where that POS Reid had his derriere saved by the “Latino vote”. (We should also note in aside the failure of Silicon Valley capitalists to seize the key nodes of the state apparatus in California, the Governorship and the U.S. Senate). That tells us something else: the Democratic Party arm of the electoral state apparatus anxiously seeks to integrate a privileged sector of this population under its political circus tent.

It should also tell us that the program must address the electoral system as another “immediate reality” to be transitioned beyond. Yes, U.S. elections are the most banal of subjects, but some programmatic address must be made, even if only to advocate complete abstention (which in effect the program does by its complete absence). My own approach is “negative intervention” for the purpose of 1) disruption of the state apparatus and 2) propaganda platform. Nothing should be novel here, except that it has never really been done in the U.S.

Otherwise, good start!

Most factory workers however do not use the Internet and surfing is primarily restricted to office employees with at least a secondary school diploma. That said, lawyers are a rising force in Chinese society and government is still figuring out how to adjust to this, particularly at provincial, county and city level.

—Towards Goldner’s statement, ” As capital turned inward on itself, the self-cannibalization of its social reproductive base since the late 1970s was echoed with eerie concision in the self-cannibalization of its once-emancipatory culture in the ideological Ebola virus spread by the post-modern nihilists and deconstructionists, the Foucaults, the Saids and the Derridas. As Marx said long ago, “the ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.”

As an admirer of Foucault, Edward Said, and Derrida, I certainly would muddy the simple minded view of their relationship with the ruling elites. How is Foucault a part of the ruling elite in anyway? The most conservative is Derrida. He may have ended up a social democrat and an atheist/jewish mystic, but is he really to be dismissed without regard to his specific ideas. The late Said also ended becoming a liberal within the PLO, but so what. Said still pushed forward some brilliant criticism of the creation of colonial and post-colonial subject.

I would also add that non and post Marxist thinkers, like Deleuze, Laclau and Mouffee, Zizek, Negri, Badiou, Ranciere, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, V. Shiva, et al. certainly give me more inspiration than what is left of the old Marxian/anarchist paradigms.

But let us be like our caricature of the old left dismissing new and creative ideas.

Connecting together my thoughts on Angelo and Goldner is also my concerns about Insurgent notes dismissal of identity politics and any form of nationalism. Is not it time for a synthesis of class with race, ethnicity, sex, gender, preference and other forms of identity? If not a synthesis, how apart a constellation where we may focus on class in one moment, but pause to think apart queer and racial politics?

While revolution in itself is a negation – by definition – of what previously existed, negation is not the same as rejection. Reject nationalism all you want – the important thing is to negate it, and history shows this is not achieved by rejection; in fact, the rejection of nationalism has only led to its resurgence in more rabid and successful forms afterward (ie Nazi Germany, Eastern Europe, Islamism, Zionism, etc). It is better, practically, to provide a framework for negation, than to outright reject.

Likewise, a critique of identity politics that merely rejects it with empty declarations of class solidarity, but will not dare to explore the material basis of the existence of privilege not aligned with class that has concrete effects on class politics is theoretical poverty and practical abstention – or worse – practical exercise of these privileges in an oppressive fashion.

A critique of anti-imperialist forms that assume the support of States rather than peoples cannot become anti-anti-imperialism without becoming imperialist in discourse and practice. Or social-imperialist if you will. Just as Polish workers rejected the Bolsheviks early on, one can both reject facile, reactionary nationalism, and understand the need for national self-determination as an integral part of the process of class self-determination. Chavez’s State is not the same, qualitatively and quantitatively, as Obama’s and to treat them as the same is theoretical lazyness at the level of those who hide behind this fact to provide unconditional defense of Chavez.

Lastly, I cannot help but view this as yet another sectarian, shibboleth pseudo-academic study group that will do nothing to organize real people, with real tasks, that have any real political impact. Too bad, because some of the things said here are indeed important.

I can also say from first hand experience that SEIU does the same thing here in Baltimore: rely on lobbying politicians and getting them to intercede legislatively for the health care industry. This happened over a hospital bankruptcy in Prince Georges County a few years back. The SEIU shop stewards I knew all saw their union’s role as that: lobbying for beneficial legislation, not mobilizing membership or reaching out to the general public, even as a traditional union may have routinely done a couple decades ago.

This raises my final point, which I haven’t really seen adequately addressed: discussion of unions in the U.S. inevitably focus on numbers and growth but not on questions of what it means to be a union activist today. A couple generations ago and even before, to be a union activist involved dedication and commitment to a larger “cause.” Today, that sensibility has almost totally disappeared and the relationship between union member and union is almost inevitably that of client and service provider. This decline in subjectivity has many causes, including those promoted by the conservative left, but it’s a subject largely not acknowledged in discussion of the labor movement.

In evidence, Mao shielded Zhou Enlai who in turn shielded Deng Xiaoping from anything much worse than wearing a dunce cap when, for being a master bridge player, he ought to have qualified for the worst. Meanwhile, Liu Qhaoqi, Peng Dahuai and other generals were jailed and left to die. Indeed, those who suffered most from the Cultural Revolution were coincidentally those who suffered most FOR the establishment of the PRC. And they were also those who would have opposed most fiercely any gearshift back into a market economy.

For the gearshift to become possible, Communism itself had to be discredited first and what better way to do it than to hand power and book of rules to a bunch of boy scouts with no life experience? Of course their egos went overboard! They were supposed to!

But of course, it is so much easier to assume Mao was a beastie.

How easy do you think it is for a middle-class farm kid with no special connections to found a movement that successfully fights (1) a civil war, (2) a foreign invader of substance and (3) establishes truly domestic rule over a nation of 400 million people, along with the political and economic independence that entails?

Who else in history compares?

Speaking of the left communist book of the ICC, I wrote, I read something “in their.” That’s the wrong spelling of “their.” It should have read, “in there.”

I enjoyed your article.

But what constantly ran through my head as I read it was, well, yes, I’m politically schizophrenic between traditional Leninist-Trotskyist communism with its principle, “The crisis of humankind can be reduced in the final analysis to the crisis of proletarian leadership,” more or less as comrade Trotsky put it in 1938 in The Transitional Programme — and, on the other hand, left communism of the sort espoused by you, this on-line publication, Insurgent Notes, other left-communist types of organizations like the Internationalist Communist Tendency, International Communist Current, and, more traditionally and older, the International Communist Party (“Bordigists”).

But what I never see in the latter groups (with, perhaps, the exception of the Bordigists, i.e., the hardline Bordigists of the International Communist Party) is some conception that to make that final assault against capital of which you speak succeed, mobilization is objectively necessary, and since mobilization is objectively necessary, there’s got to be a revolutionary party — as Trotsky put it, a revolutionary leadership — doing the mobilizing. I mean, after all, even left communists call the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution a workers’ revolution (most, at any rate; I realize Paul Mattick concluded eventually that it was a kind of non-proletarian revolution, although reading all the history of the Bolshevik Revolution I’ve read, I can’t to this day comprehend how comrade Mattick concluded that), and a fair reading of the history of that world-shaking event shows there was a Military Revolutionary Committee in the Petrograd Soviet led by a fellow named Leon Trotsky and that they on the significant night of November 7-8, 1917 (October 25-26, 1917 by the old Julian calendar still in effect when the Bolsheviks took the power that night) that Military Revolutionary Committee and particularly comrade Trotsky did, like it or not, have to issue instructions to take over the various offices like the banks, police stations, telegraph office, etc., and then finally an order for the arrest of the old provisional government was issued and a Bolshevik-led squad of revolutionary workers and soldiers did the deed.

It’s certainly right to say that the lead-up to that titanic event was the preparations of about 6 or 8 months. But someone did the preparations. Who? Well, there was this entity called, the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party-Bolshevik, and more specifically, before the return of the key guy who built that party, their own central leaders right after the March 1917 toppling of tsarism (February by the Julian calendar) were still following the Menshevik line of “critical support” to the bourgeois liberal government of the capitalists, and saying that in the elected soviets. Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and others were saying this line.

When comrade Lenin got back from exile, he was pretty pissed off about this, and a month of national congresses and arguments and debates ensued in the Bolsheviks over the line they were taking, and comrade Lenin knew damned well when he was already going public right at the moment of his return with what has gone down in history with his April Theses so that he read them not just to a closed Bolshevik conference but to a joint open conference of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks — Lenin knew damned well he was breaking formal Bolshevik party discipline. And he did it anyway. Why? Because he was saying in effect to his party leadership who were still following the old “critical support” line to the bourgeois liberal government, “This is a sufficiently world-shaking moment to make a political split, and if you guys don’t go with the flow of proletarian anger and rage that’s out there, I will go to the proletarian ranks and mobilize them against you and for a second revolution.” That’s what in effect he was saying. And that month of struggles in the party ensuing after he returned did, indeed, show that that massive proletarian-soldier-sailor-peasant-farm laborer anger was out there and that corresponded not with the “critical-support-to-the-bourgeois-liberal” line of the right-wing and center wing of the Bolsheviks, nor of the Mensheviks, but to the left-wing “for-a-second-proletarian-revolution” line of Lenin.

And like it or not, that’s called revolutionary leadership.

So in a way, I read all this stuff, and think, okay, how to make this next assault you want succeed against capital?

And I still am compelled in some form to return to comrade Trotsky’s conception that the crisis of global humankind reduces itself in the final analysis to the crisis of proletarian leadership.

Now, you did something kind and good for me. You gave me information about comrade Gabriel Miasnikov. And I’d not known squat about him till you told me what happened to him.

Subsequently, I read the left communist book published by the International Communist Current, The Russian Communist Left, and read more about him published in their by the ICC’s late supporter, comrade Ian Hebbes, who got ahold of some actual archives and documents of comrade Miasnikov. And you in effect said to me something that did make a dent on my sometimes thick skull. You in effect said, what was the justification for what happened to Miasnikov, and while the Lenin-Trotsky regime were still in existence at that? And that’s a good question. That sort of goes to the heart of communist morality and communist ethics, I guess.

But then, I’m compelled to think back on what some other communists, the late comrade Isaac Deutscher, the late comrade Victor Serge, wrote in some of their books about what happens to intransigently honest revolutionary regimes, and more historically specifically, what happened to the intransigently honest people in the Bolshevik leadership during the course of the era of the revolutionary proletarian communist phase of the regime in Russia, which I date typically as 1917-1923 (that’s probably more a Trotskyist or crypto-Trotskyist dating than it is a left-communist dating; I suspect left communists would probably date the proletarian communist phase of the regime as being more like 1917-1920 or 1917-1921, or in some really extreme cases, 1917-1918). I don’t think Serge and Deutscher were dishonest. I think they were trying to explain what happened in the case of the original Bolshevik regime to honest revolutionary men and women when they were put into intolerable conditions. I mean, their country, a new revolutionary Soviet republic, was invaded by 14 capitalist armed forces. Were they supposed to take that lying down, or were they supposed to fight back? They decided, we’ll fight back, and they appointed comrade Trotsky to organize the Red Army to do that.

Now the argument can be made, here was in embryo some sense of the later Stalinization of the regime, because the Soviet Red Army organized by Trotsky certainly had internal discipline, and some of the traditional elements of a traditional armed force, a stratified armed force.

But do you and other left-communists honestly think Cromwell’s New Model Army in England, for instance, that smashed the last remnants of feudal obligations in England, or that the French Revolutionary armed forces of 1792-1794, the embryo of the later armed force of Napoleon, which, however, in the heady French Revolutionary days of 1792-1794, the most plebeian democratic days of the French Revolution, did not have some kinds of internal discipline and organization? They did.

Now, of course, they were, indeed, not only revolutionary and formally democratic, but also bourgeois in the sense that the objective historical tasks imposed on them were bourgeois tasks. I could have added a third instance, the Union army of Lincoln. That was a socially revolutionary armed force, especially from 1862 on, but again, it was organized from the top down. Should Lincoln have said to the slaveholders’ rebellion, “Oh, we agree with your philosophy of decentralization sufficiently to set up our own armed force in a decentralized fashion, because we’re nice people”? I trust if he’d done that, slavery would not have been overthrown.

Now, of course, in the aftermath of all 3 of these bourgeois revolutions, counter-revolutions set in. Cromwell became one of the earliest oppressors of the Irish people. The overthrow of the Jacobins in 1794 was followed by events which eventually culminated in Napoleon becoming in 1804 emperor of France. And after Lincoln was murdered in 1865, a full-scale counter-revolution against black people in the American South set right in, orchestrated at least in part by Lincoln’s own former vice-president, turned president, Andrew Johnson, at first, then there was the Radical Republican phase of attempted re-imposition on the South of a racially integrated plebeian dictatorship to smash the racist counter-revolutionaries, but then, the Northern bourgeois cut the fatal deal with the Southern white former plantation owners now aspiring to be Southern capitalist employers, and the federal occupying troops were withdrawn from the Southern states in 1877 to be sent to crush a labor strike that same year. That symbolized the fact American bourgeois capitalist rule had in some substantive sense ended its historical phase of being “progressive” in the sense that in capitalist crises in the so-called “progressive” phases, the wiping out of capital values at least leads to a basis for new qualitative leaps ahead, but in the period from 1877 on, wiping out of capital values in economic crises in the U.S. no longer meant that. (We could, I suppose, haggle over this last issue, and some might suggest it would be better to date this a bit later, say in 1901 or thereabouts, and I’m open-minded on that score; the robber barons, at least, still built something, unlike today’s capitalists who build nothing.).

But again, all these “betrayed revolutions” (using the phrase from Trotsky’s great 1936-1937 book, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?) were bourgeois revolutions. So betrayal was more or less in the cards and organic, as I see it.

But the Bolsheviks took a gamble in 1917, and Lenin and his colleagues knew it was a gamble. What were they gambling on?

They were gambling on the success of the world socialist revolution; that’s what they were gambling on.

And that gamble didn’t really pay off, eventually. It started to. But for different reasons, the only non-private-capitalist-based state left standing after the 1917-1923 revolutionary wave (and I notice you used the years 1917-1921, and again, I’m not sure if that’s calculated in your case or just that you had some differences over viewing, say, the attempted German proletarian insurgency in 1923 as part of that revolutionary wave) remained, the Soviet state.

And what Serge and Deutscher in their writings were saying was not, in my view, whitewashing the earlier forms of authoritarianism of Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolshevik regime in the era of Lenin and Trotsky. Rather, Serge and Deutscher were trying to grapple with the actual factual and actual historical moment in which Lenin and Trotsky acted, and Serge and Deutscher were trying to make the rest of us see things how Lenin and Trotsky saw things.

I don’t think Serge and Deutscher, let alone Lenin and Trotsky, were amoral people immune to the concerns of communist internationalist egalitarian morality and communist internationalist egalitarian ethics. But I think they were in pretty damned intolerable conditions. And given that, there really wasn’t much else they could do, as they saw it.

Deutscher in his amazing 3-volume bio. of Trotsky (and I read that 3-volume bio. twice) said in, I believe it was volume 2, “The Prophet Unarmed,” that the Bolshevik leadership themselves first got entangled in the intricacies and threads of the growing authoritarian corruption of the new Soviet bureaucratizing state, but then, one by one, different Bolsheviks tried each in his or her own way, to disentangle himself or herself, and begin to struggle against the counter-revolution setting in in the new society. I am saying this from memory, not because I have “The Prophet Unarmed” in front of me, Loren. But I remember reading that and thinking seriously over it a lot, so it’s pretty much kind of what Deutscher said. And I think that’s a fair way of putting it.

I think that in the context of the conditions the Soviet state operated in in 1917-1923, it’s at least comprehensible why bad things happened to good people, including bad things to good people like Gabriel Miasnikov. I think it’s comprehensible why Trotsky was inculpated in that. I don’t think Trotsky’s inculpation in that is “good” from some abstract standard of morality. But communists are materialists and view morality as following from material conditions. Historical specificity is key in how communists look at how to arrive at what we must do. So in 1922 or 1923, I think some of the actions taken by Trotsky, and earlier, Lenin (before he was severely incapacitated by strokes) were at least comprehensible, even if we can view them with historical hindsight as being unfortunate.

The key thing in 1917 was, the Bolsheviks gambled on the world revolution taking their new state out of international isolation. I think that was the main gamble they made. When Trotsky finally awakened after first waffling when Lenin tried to get Trotsky to forge a bloc with Lenin in 1922 against Stalin, Trotsky fought the rest of his life for the world socialist revolution as the key programmatic element in his program which, were it to materialize, could take the Soviet state out of its isolation and, in so doing, undermine the bureaucratization and authoritarianism of the new society by creating the material foundations for material aid to the new Soviet state. The Bolsheviks were Marxist materialists, and they looked at their revolution in terms of its eventually getting aid from some richer and more well-heeled revolutionary proletarian government or revolutionary proletarian state, and they particularly focused on Germany for a number of diverse reasons I won’t enter into here. For different reasons, their hopes were dashed. The German Revolution in 1919 was smashed by the counter-revolution; the same thing happened in 1923 in Germany. There were efforts at forming a soviet in Seattle, Washington, but the American working class has historically been afflicted in our consciousness by this severe contradiction between on the one hand a willingness to enter into violent class conflict and violent class action in opposition to the capitalist bosses simultaneously with a kind of crypto-anarchic crypto-individualistic aversion to going beyond the bounds of pure-and-simple trade unionist militancy. I think a big part of that has a lot to do with the skin color question in America being a cutting issue that’s divided labor and kept labor from forging its own united class party independent of and apart from the capitalists. But in 1917-1923, even that Seattle soviet was only pretty brief, about a week or so my memory tells me (and I acknowledge that at my age, my memory is not always topnotch, so I’m willing to listen to factual corrections of some of my statements). The Bolsheviks needed the organic international unity of world socialist proletarian revolution to pull their chestnuts out of the fire of being internationally isolated, however, and that is my main point here. And one can only really condemn Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolsheviks who first got, as Deutscher said it, “entangled” in the bad elements of the new state, its authoritarianism, if one doesn’t really want a proletarian revolution in the first place, or if one condemns as the Bolsheviks’ “original sin” their leadership in 1917 of the second proletarian revolution.

If we’re going to make a successful assault on global capital, I think at bottom, that question Trotsky posed in 1938 of the crisis of humankind being the crisis of proletarian leadership still remains the main question for communists.

That, in a longwinded and roundabout way, is what I was getting at.

Anyway, again, I enjoyed your article.

Warm, comradely, communist,
internationalist greetings,

Al (Allan) Greene
Email: tompaine1917@yahoo.com

Congratulations on the new publication, which is most welcome at this time. Excellent article, look forward to more and will send some material in for your consideration.

Steven

http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/2009/09/wobbly-times-number-22.html

but in other posts as well.

Thanks for making the intellectual connections with Malthus and 19th Century capitalist conservatives. I reposted your piece to my Facebook page.

And internationally? Well, if the 3rd International is a paradigm, it’s a paradigm of something other than how an international communist movement should conduct itself.

Anyway, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. If a “new paradigm” is going to be developed, in order for it to be new, and developed, and a paradigm, it’s going to take a lot more than me and you talking about it. I’m pretty sure that part of the “trick” to all this is that the working class has to put itself into a position to establish its own organizations, its own models, its self as a paradigm.

best regards,

SA

1. implementation of a program of technology export to equalize upward the Third World.
2. creation of a minimum threshold of world income.
3. dismantling of the oil-auto-steel complex, shifting to mass transport and trains.
4. abolish the bloated sector of the military; police; state bureaucracy; corporate bureaucracy; prisons; FIRE; (finance- insurance- real estate); security guards; intelligence services; cashiers and toll takers.

etc., etc.

—

I know that you don’t have much regard for V.I. Lenin but his writings are focused laser-like on the immediate challenges of the class struggle in Czarist Russia, such as how to relate to the Zemstvo. My suggestion is to hold off on grandiose programs for worldwide communism and to use your considerable intelligence and facility with the keyboard to solve the problems facing us right now and right here in the USA, such as immigrant rights, BP oil spill, gay marriage, etc. It is only by achieving victories here and now in such struggles that we can advance toward the final goal of transforming society. Furthermore, for all your emphasis on proletarian power, there is a certain disjunction with the obvious reality of life in the USA, namely one in which workers *are not* on the move. Maybe they are in South Korea or Oaxaca, but you are not there. Unless you see yourself as a latter-day Trotsky issuing pronouncements from afar, my advice is to get a bit more grounded in the country that you live in.