Pedro (Peter) Miguel Camejo, 1939–2008

by Barry Sheppard

Peter Camejo, a Venezuelan-American revolutionary socialist his entire life from when he was a teenager, died on September 13, 2008, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The cause was cancer.

I first met Peter in 1958 when we were both students at MIT, I a senior and he a freshman. He had already joined the Young Socialist Alliance the year before, and I was a member of the Young People’s Socialist League. Despite our differences, we reached out to a broad range of students from the many campuses in the Boston area who considered themselves socialists of one kind or another to form a discussion club in the spring of 1959.

By the fall of 1959, we had both concluded that an activist organization was needed. I had become disillusioned with the YPSL for its support to the Democratic Party, and joined the YSA. Soon we also joined the Socialist Workers Party. We set out to build a YSA chapter in Boston, and our chapter’s first activity was to spearhead the formation of student committees on campuses in the area to organize picketing of stores of the Woolworth’s chain, in solidarity with the wave of lunch counter Sit-Ins Black students had launched in the South. Woolworth’s was one chain of stores the Black students had targeted to break down the Jim Crow laws preventing Blacks and whites from eating together in public places.

Another focus was defense of the Cuban Revolution. The SWP and YSA worked with Cuban supporters of the July 26th Movement to launch a Boston Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Support to revolutionary movements in Latin America was a hallmark of Peter’s political career his whole life. He was an active participant in the many discussions and debates that occurred in the ups and downs of those movements, from the Cuban’s attempts to spread the revolution through supporting rural guerrilla warfare in Latin America in the 1960s, on up to the Venezuelan revolutionary process which he was a partisan of the day he died.

In the summer of 1960 Peter was part of the YSA delegation to a Latin American Congress on Youth, where a speech by Fidel Castro indicated the direction of the Revolution, after public debate on the island. The Stalinists held the position that the Revolution had to stay within the bounds of capitalism, but in October the revolutionary leadership announced the expropriation of the Cuban capitalists as well as of the imperialists. I telephoned Peter that night, and we were excited. We concluded that Cuba had become a workers’ state. The leadership of the SWP had come to the same conclusion.

There was a minority in the SWP which rejected this view. This minority was led by three central leaders of the YSA, Tim Wohlforth, James Robertson and Shane Mage. The discussion in the SWP was democratic and thorough, and culminated in a convention in the summer of 1961 where the position of the leadership majority was upheld. A discussion then ensued in the YSA, in which Peter and I were the main spokespeople for the pro-Cuba position, which carried the day in a convention over the New Year’s holiday. The result is that I was elected the YSA National Chairman and Peter its National Secretary.

The collaboration between us that had begun in Boston continued in New York in the YSA national office. We made a good team. He had a very spirited temperament, made many imaginative suggestions for our work, some of which were very good and some not so good, and he relied on me to filter them. My temperament was more even, and at the time I knew more about Marxism. This made for a good balance.

He was one of our people who marched in Selma, Alabama together with Rev. Martin Luther King and SNCC leader John Lewis for voting rights for Blacks in the South, one of the turning points of the civil rights movement.

Peter was an excellent public speaker through to the end of his life. A few weeks before he died he got up from his sick bed to make an impassioned speech at a Peace and Freedom Party convention backing the nomination of Ralph Nader to be the P&F candidate for President in California.

Peter was the best public speaker of our generation in our movement. In fact, he was among the best of the public speakers that emerged in the youth radicalization as a whole. He was equally fluent in both Spanish and English. He spoke without notes, and had the ability to explain ideas in terms wide audiences could grasp, and a quick wit. He communicated his enthusiasm to his listeners, who knew that he passionately believed in what he was saying.

In the mid-1960s, Peter moved to the San Francisco Bay Area at the request of the SWP to strengthen our work there. He quickly became an important leader of the student and antiwar movements at the University of California at Berkeley. He was singled out by then Governor Ronald Reagan as one of the “most dangerous men” in the state because he was in the thick of every major demonstration. The University expelled him for using a University microphone at an antiwar action.

Following the great May-June, 1968 student-worker uprising and general strike — near socialist revolution — in France, Peter initiated a broad coalition of Berkeley left groups in solidarity. A peaceful demonstration of 1,000 was attacked by the police without provocation. The demonstrators fought back, which initiated three days and nights of mass meetings and fighting with the police. The YSA headquarters became a first-aid station. Peter was the central leader and public spokesman of the movement and helped steer it toward militant mass action around the single issue of defending the democratic right of freedom of assembly. All decisions were made in mass meetings which heard different proposals. Peter always carried the day.

Demonstrators overwhelmingly approved his proposal to continue to assert their right to assembly, defying the police if necessary. The demonstrators took this position with full knowledge of the possible consequences because it was thoroughly debated. They were fully prepared to defend their rights against any attack, and organized accordingly. In the court of public opinion among the residents of Berkeley, the demonstrators began to be supported as the issue became generally known, and the city administration became isolated. When it became clear that thousands were going to assert their rights by gathering in the street, prepared for self-defense, the city finally relented and the demonstration turned into a victory rally with all the groups who had supported the movement, from the Black Panthers to the SWP and YSA. Peter was the main speaker as the acknowledged leader.

Peter then took an assignment to go to Boston to strengthen the SWP and YSA, which were playing a leading role in the antiwar movement there as well as nationally. In October 1969 there was a massive outpouring of antiwar actions called the Moratorium. The major action in Boston was a mass meeting on the Commons of 100,000. More moderate pro–Democratic Party forces tried to keep Peter from speaking. They finally relented, but put him as the last speaker on a long list. The crowd began to disperse before Peter started speaking, but was electrified and regrouped. One of his points was to humanize the Vietnamese “enemy.” He finished to a standing ovation. The press and even Democratic Party people admitted that Peter’s speech was the best received of the day.

During the great student antiwar strike in May 1970, decisions on what to do next were made in mass meetings. Peter spoke at many of these meetings as did other members of the SWP and YSA. Various ultralefts would propose “militant” actions. Our mass action perspective, actually more militant than their infantile proposals for street theater, carried the day almost everywhere, not only in Boston but across the country. Peter was especially persuasive in these meetings.

In 1969, a faction struggle emerged in the Fourth International, the world-wide organization of Trotskyist groups, which was to last for seven years. The initial issue was whether our parties in Latin America should launch rural guerrilla war throughout the continent. The majority position was to support this perspective. A minority, which the SWP supported, opposed this orientation. The minority said it was wrong to project a tactic, rural guerrilla war, as a strategy for a whole continent regardless of the concrete situation in each country. In fact, attempts to carry out this perspective met with disaster in Bolivia and Argentina, the countries singled out to begin the process. Peter played a leading role in this debate, traveling throughout the continent, and as one of our leaders in the discussions in the bodies of the FI in the early 1970s.

One of the supporters of the minority was Hugo Blanco, who had become famous as a peasant organizer in the Cuzco region of Peru. The peasant’s demand was for land, and they began to take over land from the semi-feudal landowners, who attacked the peasants with private armies. Blanco helped lead the organization of armed defense squads to fight back. When the national government sent the army in to crush the movement, Blanco led a guerrilla that was rooted in the masses of the region, so he was quite knowledgeable about the tactic. With the support of the peasantry, has band held out for a time, but the army finally captured him. The SWP and the FI launched a defense campaign to save his life. Peter met with Blanco in prison. The defense campaign eventually resulted in Blanco being freed, and he later was elected to the parliament.

Peter had many exciting moments in his Latin American travels.

Following the disclosures of government dirty tricks that began to come out in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the SWP and YSA launched a lawsuit in 1973 against the government and its different political police agencies. Besides these organizations themselves, there were a few named plaintiffs, including Peter. He was the main speaker at the rally that publicly launched the suit. We eventually won.

In the 1976 elections, Peter was our Presidential candidate, the overwhelming choice of the membership. His running mate was Willie Mae Reid, a Black woman who had been active in the Black struggle for some years, especially in Chicago. We launched the campaign early in 1975, to maximize the time it could be utilized to popularize our views. Peter and Willie Mae criss-crossed the country in many speaking engagements for nearly two years. This was the largest election campaign the SWP has held, before or since, and we recruited many new members as a result.

When the Nicaraguan revolution triumphed in 1979, Peter was part of a team we sent to size up the events. He came back in time to address the SWP convention in August. His first word were, “The socialist revolution has begun in Nicaragua!” In September I went with Peter to Nicaragua, with other SWP members, as part of an international team, which included Hugo Blanco. We concluded that a workers’ and peasants’ government had been established. We also rented a house – cheap because the owner didn’t want to stay in the new situation. Peter, then others, was assigned to live there to help us follow the revolution.

Certain negative features had begun to appear in the SWP in the 1970s. By 1978 the leadership was on its way to becoming a cult around the central leader who had emerged from the party’s work in the radicalization of “The Sixties,” Jack Barnes. By 1980, the Party began to degenerate. In 1981 Peter went on a visit to Venezuela. While he was absent, a meeting of the National Committee was held. At that meeting we were told that Peter had resigned. I didn’t find out until some years later after I had left the SWP that this was an outright lie, orchestrated by Jack Barnes. Jack had always been jealous of the fact that Peter was the darling of the party membership. Over the next years in the 1980s most of the central leaders were forced out one way or another.

So this is how Peter was removed from the SWP. He tried to build a new organization, North Star Network, named after the paper put out by the great abolitionist Frederick Douglas. When he was in the party Peter had taken an interest in American radical history, including the Civil War. He wrote a book, “Racism, Revolution, Reaction, 1861–1877” which we published during the 1976 election campaign.

While North Star attracted other former members of the SWP, most were in the process of drifting away from politics, and it slowly fell apart. In subsequent years, Peter kept trying to find a way to rebuild. He had come to the conclusion that the times were not propitious to launch a new democratic-centralist organization like the SWP had been. He also began to question whether the program of the SWP was sectarian in and of itself. While his views on this vacillated, and were never clearly spelled out, this led to a difference between us. He had moved to the Bay Area, as I and my companion Caroline Lund had done later in 1991, so I kept in touch with him.

In the 1980s and ’90s he worked with the Australian Democratic Socialist Party, which had succeeded in maintaining itself as a democratic centralist organization, unlike many other groups around the world who became sects or collapsed in the face of the retreat of the radicalization of “The Sixties.” He made many trips to Australia to speak for the DSP. He also worked with a group around Matt McCartin, a Maori and labor leader in New Zealand.

For a time he worked with a group led by Max Elbaum that came out of the Maoist Line of March, but which had evolved away from Maoism and Stalinism. For a time I worked with Peter in this endeavor, but when it became clear that Elbaum was sticking to one aspect of American Stalinism, support to the Democratic Party, we both broke off political relations with this tendency.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, the US Communist Party split. One side formed the Committees of Correspondence. The CoC was particularly strong in California, and Peter was an early participant in its formation in its first, fluid years. Its first national gathering was held at the U of C Berkeley campus, and was billed as open to all tendencies. Some 2,400 from around the country attended. The event included many workshops that were characterized by free-flowing discussions, as well as plenary sessions. I met many former members of the SWP there.

Prominent former CP leaders rejected the crimes of Stalinism, as well as some of their own. An example was Herbert Aptheker, who rejected his own role in justifying such things as the Kremlin’s crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and others.

It appeared that emerging from this promising beginning a new socialist organization could be built of many thousands of members. Such an organization would necessarily be multi-tendency, and would contain revolutionists as well as reformists, many in between, and many new to socialist ideas. To go forward, a national speaking tour of teams representing the various forces at the Berkeley meeting could have signed up members across the country. Also, a national newspaper would have to be started up, with positions all agreed on as well as full public debates of differences. But neither of these things happened. Over time, if the CoC had gone in this direction, such debates would clarify areas of agreement as well as differences, and probably lead to splits.

The CoC gradually wasted away, and the initial enthusiasm dissipated. It became clear that what was behind this evolution was that a grouping of ex-CP leaders around Charlene Mitchell in New York was dead set against the participation in any meaningful way of other tendencies. Their central political position which they held inviolate was support to the Democratic Party. Peter, myself and others began to realize this and became less involved, and then quit.

While participating in the early years of this development, Peter also helped found the California Green Party in 1991. He became one of the best-known Greens nationally. His objective was to build an electoral vehicle capable of challenging the Democratic Party from the left. He was also seeking to further the ecological movement. He had become more and more convinced that humanity was facing an ecological catastrophe under capitalism.

The 2000 Presidential elections put the Green Party on the map when it ran Ralph Nader. Two revolutionary socialist groups, the International Socialist Organization and Solidarity, supported the Nader campaign, and Peter, who was instrumental in nominating Nader, worked with both. The anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle had occurred in 1999, radicalizing a new generation of young people. These poured into the Nader campaign, and brought their energy and enthusiasm into it.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 handed the Bush administration what it had been looking for, a “Pearl Harbor” excuse for a sharp turn toward war and greater authoritarianism. In this atmosphere, Peter ran for Governor of California in 2002, as the candidate of the Green Party. Peter used his campaign to speak out against the war. Under his influence, the California Green Party had adopted a pro–working class platform, which included defense of undocumented migrant workers, a large number of whom worked in the California fields, restaurants, and construction. Peter made important inroads into coverage by Latino radio and newspapers, and among Mexican-American political groups.

One demonstration Peter spoke to was in Santa Rosa, a center of immigrant workers. The action was called by immigrant rights groups, and was endorsed by the Green Party. Hardly any Greens showed up, however, a reflection of the party’s organizational weakness, something Peter was quite aware of. Caroline Lund and I participated in a march of some 500 immigrant workers which culminated in a rally where Peter was the featured speaker. He spoke Spanish, and was enthusiastically received by the workers.

Peter received five percent of the vote state-wide, a large vote for any third party in some time. In San Francisco, he got 16 percent!

In 2003, Governor Gray Davis (an appropriate name for this center-right dull Democrat) was recalled in a referendum initially backed by the Republican right, but which garnered wide support. A special election was called, and Peter was again the Green candidate. A Latino Democrat was running, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Republicans. There were other minor candidates. A televised debate was held, which Arnold boycotted. The debate was seen across the country. The media commentators concluded that Peter had won the debate hands down. He refrained from personal attacks, unlike the other candidates, and had the facts and figures at hand to back his policies.

After Bush stole the 2000 election from Al Gore, the Democrats launched a campaign to blame Nader for their loss. Nader stayed firm against the Democrats, but many in the Green Party started to fold. This became clear at the Green Party convention in 2004, when, through undemocratic manipulations, the delegates rejected nominating Nader. They nominated an unknown instead, who ran a low-key campaign and urged a vote for himself only in “safe” states, with a vote for Democrat Kerry where the election was close.

Peter became Nader’s Vice Presidential candidate in 2004. They ran as independents. The Democratic Party went all out to deny the Nader-Camejo ticket space on the ballot. The lesser-evil mood was deep, and Nader this time received many fewer votes than in 2000.

Peter opened up a fight inside the Green Party for internal democracy and for independence from the Democrats. His popularity among Greens in California resulted his being nominated for Governor once again in 2006. He began to have health problems during the campaign, and he resolved that it would be his last.

He hoped that his fight inside the Green Party would result in a left wing forming. He told me he thought this could result in a new Green-Labor Party to emerge. However, there just wasn’t enough juice in the party for this to happen.

Soon after the 2006 election, he found out that he had cancer. In his remaining time he concentrated on a book about his political career. He completed the drafts of the final chapters shortly before he died. It is to be hoped that this book appears after the editing process, so that the remarkable story of this outstanding revolutionists can be told in full for the new generations of fighters who will emerge to fight this degenerating system. The book will be titled North Star.

In August 2006, Caroline Lund and I held a party to celebrate our fortieth anniversary. She was dying from ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the party was also to say goodbye to her. I have a wonderful photo of myself, Peter and Caroline in her wheelchair that was taken at the party.

Goodbye, my dear friend. Goodbye, my comrade. I will remember you until I can no longer remember anything. Goodbye.