Making Sense of Trotskyism in the United States: Two Memoirs
by Paul Le Blanc
[This review-essay was written for and is scheduled to appear in the British journal Revolutionary History, which has granted permission to circulate it on-line. Please include this acknowledgement when sharing it.]
Peter
Camejo, North
Star, A Memoir (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), 364 pages with index.
$18.00
Leslie
Evans, Outsider’s Reverie, A Memoir
(Los Angeles: Boryana Books, 2010), 438 pages with
index. $18.95
The
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the United States was for a number of years
the largest and strongest section of the Fourth International — both of which
were formally established in 1938, both representing the revolutionary
socialist perspectives associated with Leon Trotsky. Rooted in opposition to
Stalinism in the early Communist movement, the U.S. Trotskyists
worked closely with Trotsky in building the Fourth International, the global
network of small revolutionary groups adhering to the original “Bolshevik-Leninist”
perspectives. They also played a heroic role in U.S. class struggles of the
1930s, and their reputation among many was as unyielding partisans of workers’
democracy and Trotsky’s revolutionary Marxist orientation. Yet in the
non-revolutionary aridity of 1950s America, their ranks dwindled down to
handfuls of stalwarts, perhaps 400 aging members, in a handful of cities.
The
memoirs of Peter Camejo and Leslie Evans were
produced by two of the most talented of the “1960s generation” rebels who
flowed into and revitalized the SWP. Camejo (joining
in 1959) was perhaps the best known activist leader of the party in the 1960s
and 1970s, and Evans (who joined in 1961) was perhaps its most capable writer,
editor and educator of that same “youth” layer. Both basically turned away from
Trotskyism, quite consciously, during the 1980s. What is strange is that the
SWP as a whole absolutely did the same thing — expelling or driving out all those
not inclined to go along with the transition to its own esoteric variety of Castroism. Yet to their credit, neither Camejo
nor Evans were able to remain inside the newly-revised version of the SWP, and
their stories each in their own way reveal much about the “how” and the “why”
of this development. What each has to say, however, goes beyond the specifics
of that experience. Larger questions emerge regarding the nature of activism
and social change, the validity of Marxism, the possibility and/or need of
socialism.
Camejo was writing his
autobiography in a race with terminal cancer — which he almost won. Evans
helped edit this book and prepare it for publication, and he was consequently
inspired to write his own autobiography. But the two books are dramatically
different in more than one way. Camejo focuses much
more on social movements and struggles, all motivated by a never-ending
opposition to the injustices of capitalism. Evans focuses much, much more on
political ideas as well as internal life and conflicts within the SWP — and far
more than Camejo he has made his peace with the
status quo, settling into a niche very much to the right of his fellow memoirist.
Camejo rejects the old Trotskyism because he sees it
as an obstacle to revolution — Evans rejects it in large measure because he has
decided that revolution itself is a bad thing, although this break was neither
simple nor easy for him:
In 1983 I may have begun to have doubts about Lenin and Marxism,
but a lifetime of personal and political loyalties didn’t die easily or
quickly. Part of it was habit, part loyalty to my fellow expellees. Then there
were the dead to whom you had to answer. Trotskyism, like most religions, had
its many martyrs, who inspired belief and dedication by their example. There
was Trotsky himself, assassinated by Stalin’s agent in Mexico in 1940. His son,
Leon Sedov, was murdered in a Swiss hospital in 1938
by Russian doctors secretly working for the KGB. There were the Old Bolsheviks,
most of Lenin’s Central Committee, shot in the back of the head in the basements
of Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, where the cells were
conveniently supplied with floor drains. And the countless anonymous victims I
had become familiar with from the movement’s literature: The Trotskyist prisoners at the Vorkuta labor camp in Siberia,
marched in groups to the firing squads in 1937 singing the Internationale,
and the hundreds of Chinese Trotskyists shot by the
Maoists in 1952, it was said after having their tongues cut out so they
couldn’t shout any last protests. A few of them were jailed instead and
remained there until after Mao’s death. (Evans, 312)
In
his own fashion, Evans seeks to remain true to this tradition — by writing as honest
an account as he can, and certainly respectful of the finest in the old
traditions that he has turned away from. As such, his memoir is a treasure
trove for those seeking to understand at least some of the dynamics of the SWP
in its years of growth and decline while Evans was a member. Yet it is hardly
the kind of book one would hand to a young activist to help her or him carry on
the revolutionary struggle for a better world, a struggle Evans now rejects.
Camejo also seeks to
remain true to his earlier commitments — in his own fashion. But its thrust and
spirit make it an ideal volume for young activists. He tells us:
The battles in which small groups of Trotskyists
fought against Stalinism will go down in history as heroic. Trotskyists
were murdered in tremendous numbers in Russia and were persecuted in other
countries as well. They faced enormous hostility from the huge mass base of the
Communist parties, but also endured attacks from pro-capitalist forces.
As an instrument to revive the mass world movement for social
justice, however, I think that Trotskyism had historical, internal, sectarian
limits that blocked it from being able to become a critical force for social
change. But during the early 1970s I can see in my diary that I still thought
it was possible that the Trotskyist movement would
gradually, and with occasional opportunities for explosive growth, come to
replace the influence of the Stalinists and social democrats. (Camejo, 115–116)
Both
books give a vibrant sense of the perceptions and realities that made “believers”
of Evans, Camejo, and many other activists of that
time.
Glory Days
An almost “glowing” chapter in Evans’s memoir deals with the
amazing year 1968. His focus is global, involving a blend of triumph and
tragedy: the dramatic surge in the Vietnamese liberation struggle; the decision
of President Johnson not to seek re–election due to anti-war pressure; the
quest for “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia associated with the “Prague
Spring”—and the repressive Soviet invasion a few months later; the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. as he was coming to the aid of striking
sanitation workers, followed by enraged urban uprisings in black communities
throughout the nation; militant student strikes throughout the United States;
the May-June student and workers upsurge in France that almost toppled the De
Gaulle regime; the mass student struggles in Mexico, violently repressed by the
regime; and the militant protests in Chicago during the Democratic Party
convention. All of this gave life to what had often been abstract assertions of
revolutionary internationalism. “The afterglow of 1968,” he writes, “radiated
for several years, raising spirits and hopes.” (Evans, 194)
Camejo’s account puts us in the thick of the battle. He tells us about tactics
and strategy of the late 1960s and early ’70s — the remarkable “Battle for Telegraph
Avenue” in the radicalizing Berkeley of 1968, the People’s Park confrontation,
defense campaigns and electoral campaigns, all in the context of a sustained
analysis of capitalism, state repression, imperialism, etc. that he held as
much at the time of writing as at the earlier time of doing. A richly detailed
chapter is devoted to the movement to end the Vietnam war,
in which Camejo describes and defends the basic SWP
strategy.
Although less detailed, Evans’s account is also positive. He
describes the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) in which the SWP was a
leading force — in competition with the seemingly more radical Peoples
Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ, backed by diverse elements that included
the Communist Party, an increasingly ultraleft SDS,
some radical pacifists, etc.). He notes that what “NPAC had going for it [was] a
clear focus on the war, based on mass peaceful legal demonstrations, and the
SWP cadres, who were generally tough dedicated people embedded in the
leadership of real antiwar groups in a dozen major cities.” When NPAC “called
for national demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco for April 24, 1971,
PCPJ backed a week of civil disobedience and disruptions in Washington
beginning May 1.”
Far more than the May Day actions, April 24 was building all over
the country, and then came under attack from conservative newspaper columnists
Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who published an attack warning of “Trotskyite
Communists … [who] were running NPAC,” and lamenting that “what makes all this
significant is that the Trotskyists are not the few
bedraggled malcontents of a generation ago but the most dynamic, most effective
organization on the American far left.” Les Evans comments: “I cite this to
show how the government and much of the mainstream press viewed us in those
years, and how we viewed ourselves. We had come from the few hundred
‘bedraggled malcontents’ I had joined in 1961 to become generals of the antiwar
army.” Indeed, 800,000 in Washington and at least 250,000 in San Francisco
mobilized — in contrast to the 16,000 drawn to PCPJ’s more “radical” but
disparate action on May 1. (Evans, 209–210)
The
fact that both Evans and Camejo are quite prepared to
critically examine and reject much of what they and the SWP did gives weight to
the fact that both present a very positive account of the U.S. Trotskyists’ role in helping build the mass movement that
contributed to ending the U.S. war in Vietnam — peaceful, legal, broad-based
mass actions focused on a central demand: bring
the troops home now. Their great respect for certain figures in the older
generation is also enhanced by the fact that they now disagree with much of
what these figures stood for.
Among
the electoral campaigns run by the SWP — which were always educational
campaigns to get out socialist ideas and help build social movements and
struggles — the most dynamic by far was the Presidential candidacy of Peter Camejo and his running-mate Willie Mae Reid. More than most
other candidates, Camejo was able to generate energy
and enthusiasm, sometimes break into the mass media, and get out the socialist
message. The SWP membership, he suggests, “sensed that, unlike the other party
speakers, there was something unique in my presentations that attracted new people
to the SWP. However, most people did not realize that it was the nonsectarian
manner of my approach — they just thought it was because I was a good speaker,
a sort of political stand-up comic who used a lot of humor to illustrate points
and keep the audience entertained.” (Camejo, 129–130)
The
combined size of the SWP and its youth group the Young Socialist Alliance, by
1976, exceeded 2000 people — mostly in their 20s and 30s, with tremendous
energy and commitment. There was a substantial weekly newspaper, The Militant, a monthly
theoretical/political magazine, the International
Socialist Review (which Evans edited in its most successful phase), plus
the international weekly Intercontinental
Press edited by Trotsky’s former secretary Joe Hansen. There was also
Pathfinder Press, a publishing house producing a remarkable array of books and
popular pamphlets, largely overseen by George Breitman,
another veteran of the movement, whose Malcolm
X Speaks made the speeches of Malcolm X available to millions, and who made
excellent editions of Trotsky’s writings available throughout the
English-speaking world. The SWP also boasted a substantial three-story national
headquarters, a chain of combined offices/book stores/forum halls (with weekly
forums) in a growing number of cities, maintained by an impressive corps of paid
staff and many, many more hardworking volunteer activists.
What Happened?
How
could something so good go so wrong? Looming large in both accounts is the
figure of Jack Barnes. The rise of Barnes cannot be understood without
reviewing some history about, and tracing some tensions within, the U.S. Trotskyist “old guard.” Evans gives considerable attention
to such matters.
Back
in 1953, the semi-retired founder of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon — now
living on the West Coast, surrounded by like-minded comrades there, and in
touch with veteran comrades around the country — pressured the new national
leadership of union veterans Farrell Dobbs and Tom Kerry, into a brutal
factional dispute with a significant layer of comrades, led by Bert Cochran. The
Cochran group, favoring a dramatic curtailment of open SWP activities in the McCarthyite anti-communist atmosphere generated by the Cold
War, had aligned itself with the leadership of the Fourth International headed
by Michel Pablo, who was calling for Trotskyists
around the world to fold their banners in order to carry out a “deep entry”
into Communist and social democratic movements and organizations. Cannon would
have none of this — pressuring a reluctant Dobbs and Kerry onto a course of
struggle and split. Working closely with Cannon in this were a dynamic husband
and wife team, Murray Weiss and Myra Tanner Weiss. Once the integrity of the
SWP was preserved, and particularly with Stalinism’s crisis generated by the Khrushchev
revelations of Stalin’s crimes, the couple pushed forward (with apparent
support from Cannon) in outward-reaching regroupment
efforts on the Left. In the process, they developed a substantial influence
among recently recruited younger comrades who were involved in forming a new
youth group in the late 1950s, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA).
Believing that they were the rightful leaders of the SWP, Dobbs and
Kerry deeply resented Cannon’s interventions, and had a profound antipathy
toward the “Weissites” (Murray, Myra, and anyone
associated with them). But “Weissites” were not the
only forces involved in building up the YSA. Clusters of young comrades around
Tim Wohlforth and James Robertson and new recruits
Peter Camejo and Barry Sheppard were also helping
lead the newly-formed Young Socialist Alliance. Dobbs and Kerry, seeking to “tighten
up” the party regime, increasingly worked to sideline and marginalize the “Weissites” — and when Wohlforth
and Robertson moved into increasingly vociferous opposition (around issues of
the Cuban Revolution and the reunification of the Fourth International), they
found themselves marginalized and finally expelled (going on to form,
respectively, the Workers League associated with Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labor
League in Britain, and the Spartacist League). This
left Camejo and Sheppard, but in the radical
stirrings of the early 1960s new forces were increasingly drawn in. “The real
standout was Jack Barnes, a Carleton College graduate who joined the YSA and
SWP in Minneapolis,” according to Camejo. “Jack
helped recruit a group of very capable leaders into the YSA, including Carleton
classmates Larry Seigle, Dan Styron, and Mary-Alice
Waters; while at graduate school at Northwestern, Jack brought in brothers Joel
and Jon Britton, Lew Jones, and several more from the Chicago area.” (Camejo, 37)
Evans adds nuance and detail. Initially, Barnes was not an
impressive speaker. “When I first heard him in 1963 he was halting and
difficult to follow. Oscar Coover [an older party
veteran], who had heard him give a talk in Los Angeles after I had moved to San
Francisco, said to me afterwards, ‘How can the national office send us somebody
like that? He has no idea how to speak, and the way he waves that stump of his
around would put anybody off.’ Jack did have the habit when speaking of
slapping his left elbow where the arm ended [due to a birth defect] with his
right hand for emphasis.” While he never lost that mannerism, Barnes soon
matured as a speaker. By the 1965 YSA convention, “Barnes emerged as the
central leader of the YSA, the most authoritative and assured speaker on the
major resolutions on the floor. When it was over, a brief plenum of the newly
elected National Committee was called before we all left for home. It was held
in a small unheated room. Outside, snow was falling and the temperature inside
was near freezing. We were all standing, wearing our overcoats and breathing
out white clouds of chill vapor. It made me think of the Bolshevik high command
at the Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg during the
October Revolution.” It was in this setting that Barnes — nominating himself —
was overwhelmingly selected as national chairman of
the YSA.” (Evans, 178, 157)
By this time, Evans notes, “Jack’s standing had risen enormously,
from a branch leader in Chicago to the effective head of the party. Farrell
Dobbs didn’t hand over the post of national secretary until 1972 but it was
already clear that Jack and his inner circle were the heirs of the generation of
the 1930s. The handful of middle-generation recruits from the late forties and
the 1950s, such as Fred Halstead, Dick Garza, Ed Shaw, and Bob Himmel, were subordinate.” Yet there were disturbing early
signs. An angry dissident from the Bloomington, Indiana YSA told Evans and his
then-wife Kipp Dawson about Barnes’s heavy-handedness
toward those differing with him, adding: “Jack Barnes is the Stalin of the SWP.…The
older comrades are desperate for successors so they blind themselves to it but
Barnes is building a machine just like Stalin did. He undermines anyone who
isn’t part of his clique and gets them out of the way. He doesn’t want recruits
who know anything, nobody who was ever in any other socialist organization. All
he wants is empty vessels he can fill up with his picture of himself as another
Lenin.” Evans and Dawson decided to reserve judgment. By the late 1960s, Evans
observed, “Barnes himself adapted publicly to the standards of conduct of the
older generation of party leaders, tough but fair. Still, there were
differences and warning signs in private. Unlike any of the older group, Jack
routinely said vicious things about people to anyone who happened to be around,
which I took as a technique to keep people in line as you knew he would pillory
you out of your hearing if you displeased him.” (Evans, 178, 151,227)
The national party leadership — in the minds of some of the new
comrades — tended to be ranked in a particular way: “Joseph Hansen and George Breitman were theoreticians, the highest superlative, while
Tom Kerry and Farrell Dobbs were at best politicians, able to carry out policy
but not to formulate it. George Novack ranked lower
still, an educator.” All were in their 60s, more or less .
There was the need for…a Barnes. Even the way he wielded his half-arm “was
something of a defiant pose, saying to the world that he was unyielding and
wouldn’t concede an inch to a physical obstacle. He was the same in politics,
hard, ruthless, and unyielding. That was what attracted us to him. The SWP as
it existed at the 1963 convention seemed an impossibly weak instrument to rouse
and mobilize the millions it would take to turn out the men of property who
owned the country. Barnes meant to build a different kind of organization, as
hard and mean as himself.” More than this, “there was a clear strong
intelligence that rarely sounded like sloganeering or the tendency in many of
the older comrades to approach every new situation with a set of fixed dead
categories into which everything had to be shoveled. He looked always at the
places where a small group could intervene in a situation to shape it. He was
hard, which is what attracted us to him, but he seemed to also be fair. I was
surprised at his patience in waiting five more years to assume the title of
national secretary when he already carried its authority. He would wait seven
years after that, until most of the older generation were
dead, before making a decisive move to impose his own vision on the party.” It
was clear to those who were watching that there was a Barnes machine, “a group
within the younger leadership, most importantly the Carleton people and a few
he had picked up in Chicago, who were his base and who were almost always
favored in the distribution of important assignments.” (Evans, 158, 143,178–179)
The new leadership layer worked hand-in-glove with the old, in the
1969–1974 transition period, around a fierce dispute within the Fourth International
which began over whether Trotskyists in Latin America
should support a continental strategy of guerrilla warfare or adhere to the
traditional “Leninist strategy of Party building” rooted in the struggles of
the working class — but soon encompassing a multiplicity of related issues. By
the mid-1970s, SWPers felt, with some justification,
that they had more or less won this dispute — but the taste of victory, and the
certainty that theirs was the correct understanding of global reality, soured
by 1979–80 as the Iranian Revolution that they had supported took an unexpected
turn to reactionary Islamic fundamentalism, and as the Sandinista struggle in
Nicaragua, which they insisted was about to collapse because it followed the
wrong strategy, was swept to victory.
Disorientation
and Disaster
The SWP actually began to flounder after the end of the Vietnam war. The question of questions was how to integrate the work
of the party with the realities of the U.S. working class. With Barnes and his machine
firmly in place, and the old guard moving (or being moved) increasingly to the
sidelines, there was a decision to break up large SWP branches and create
smaller community branches — which badly flopped. The decision to shift to
working-class struggles was hardly unreasonable, however, although neither Camejo nor Evans give attention to dramatic stirrings in
the United Mine Workers (the struggles and triumph of Miners for Democracy),
the United Steel Workers (the militant campaign of dissident Ed Sadlowski), the International Brotherhood of Teamsters
(where Teamsters for Democracy was making headway), the Oil, Chemical and
Atomic Workers (where a militant Tony Mazzocchi was
becoming a force in the national leadership and beginning to agitate for a
labor party), or the dramatic upsurge in organizing and struggle among service
workers and government employees. What they are alert to, however, is how the “turn
to industry” was increasingly bungled. Camejo puts it
this way:
The SWP gradually separated itself from all political activity,
rendering the membership passive. Finding union jobs in auto, steel, or another
industry allowed some members to maintain the illusion they were doing
something political. But the SWP leadership went so far as to dictate that
members should not be teachers, work for a library, or take any sort of “middle
class” job, and there was not to be any more student movement work. This
disconnect from reality led to internal conflict, factionalism, and expulsions,
until the SWP was reduced to a sect, a cult around Barnes. (Camejo,
176)
While
comrades were deployed in industrial jobs, the new party leadership seemed to
have little understanding about how the SWP could relate to the actual problems
and struggles of workers in the industrial workplaces. Evans along with some
other comrades took a job as an iron ore miner on the desolate Minnesota iron
range — which was hit badly in the 1980s by lay-offs brought on by an economic
restructuring that led to what some economists called the “de-industrialization
of America.” A party branch meeting was set to discuss what the comrades’
response should be. The branch organizer — in touch with the national office — “proposed
that the party members at the next meeting of Local 1938…call for having a
Nicaragua slide show.” A loyal comrade named Anne Teasdale, “still disbelieving
that this could really be the whole of the party’s anti-layoff strategy, spoke
up. ‘Don’t we have something to say about what is happening here on the Range,
the unemployment, what people are supposed to do about it.?’
She was met with rage.” One leading member accused her of “lowering our
international banner” and failing to support revolutions in Central America and
the Caribbean. “Others chimed in.” (Evans, 289)
This relates to another key factor that Evans emphasizes, coming
into play beginning in 1978. “Jack had had a revelation about Fidel Castro
hardly less searing than Saint Paul’s on the road to Damascus….Barnes said he
was electrified by suddenly understanding that the Cubans had a strategy to
intervene to promote revolutions.” Struggles in Nicaragua, El Salvador,
Grenada, etc. provided proof that Cuba was becoming the fount of world
revolution. He adds: “It was clear that Jack was determined to make a turn
toward Havana and that Joe Hansen was on the outs with the party’s younger
inner circle.” Hansen died in at the beginning of 1979 — but Michael Baumann,
who had been working closely with Hansen on Intercontinental
Press, told Evans that “Joe didn’t agree with Jack on anything by the time
he died.” Camejo reported to Evans shortly before his
own death in 2008 that Hansen had approached him in the late 1970s with a
proposal to form a bloc against Barnes. “Barnes is completely unacceptable. You
can’t treat people like that,” he said. “Peter added that he was frightened and
quickly ended the discussion.”(Evans, 253–254, 256)
Evans was disturbed by the “whispering campaign without a vote or
documents,” utilized by the Barnes machine to “overturn forty or fifty years
and turn the orthodox into outcasts,” recognizing: “This was going to be bad.” His
next comment is revealing: “It was clear that Jack’s basic motivation in his
whole current political shift was to seek the approval of Havana, which had
close ties with Moscow, where Trotsky was a demonic figure. But I was still
reluctant to break with the party’s favorable assessment of the Cuban
government on its home turf.” Aside from hoping that Barnes might be right,
there was another reason for not challenging the reorientation. “There were two
small opposition groups in the party that had done that, and become very
isolated as a result. One was composed of Tom Kerry’s supporters, led by Nat Weinstein
in San Francisco and Lynn Henderson in Minneapolis. The other was based in New
York, led by George Breitman, trade unionist Frank
Lovell, and Steve Bloom. I thought Weinstein was hopelessly dogmatic and
sterile. I was friends with Breitman and held him in
high esteem, but didn’t agree with him that the Cuban state was an undemocratic
dictatorship though with an anti-imperialist and anticapitalist
character.” (Evans, 279)
A
new party leadership school was established, with the students handpicked and
the classes taught by Barnes and trusted lieutenants. “The first graduates
began giving classes and internal speeches saying Trotsky’s theory of Permanent
Revolution was an ultraleft mistake and that his claim
to have reached agreement with Lenin in April 1917 on the aims of the Russian
Revolution was not true,” according to Evans. At the 1981 SWP convention, 42%
of the National Committee, mostly seasoned and somewhat critical-minded
comrades in their 30s and 40s, were replaced by little-known younger “hards.” He comments: “The purge list included Dick Roberts,
the party’s only economist; Jeff Mackler, a leader of
the teachers union; Ray Markey, president of the New York librarians union; Kipp Dawson, Syd Stapleton and
Lew Jones, all important leaders in the antiwar work; and myself….Most of us
concluded that the change of line being hinted at in the corridors was going
public soon and the New York leadership wanted to strip potential critics of
the status as National Committee members before any discussion began. We still
thought there would be a discussion.” In fact, the regularly scheduled national
convention which was to occur in 1983 was cancelled in order to block the
discussion, with expulsions already in full-swing. (Evans,
277–278, 303).*
Over
the next several years, Barnes’s SWP engineered splits in other sections of the
Fourth International, creating small groups of co-thinkers who would sell The Militant in their respective
countries, uncritically praising Fidel, Cuba and (for a time) the Nicaraguan
Sandinistas. By 1990 they formally announced what had been true for several
years — their abandonment of the Fourth International, in preparation for a new
“communist international” that would be created (they were sure) by Cuban and
Central American revolutionaries. Camejo, who had
little problem with supporting Fidelistas and
Sandinistas, was too opposed to sectarianism, and too popular among activists,
to be trusted by the Barnes machine — and special, quite successful efforts
were made in 1982 to put him outside of the SWP. He comments:
The Barnes cult added a distinctive twist. They decided to refer to
themselves publicly as “communist,” which they do to this day. In the world of
political sects this is a conscious effort to remain isolated. It assures their
few followers that they stand alone, that they will prove right and everyone
else wrong. The cult leader has mystical inherent knowledge that no one else is
able to attain except by becoming a follower. (Camejo,
176)
In
the course of the 1980s and ’90s, the SWP devolved into a small and isolated
entity — with little connection to the social struggles of its time. Its
international collaborators fared no better. But the sad tale cries out for
explanations. How could this have happened? What explains the degeneration? It
cannot be laid simply at the feet of Jack Barnes. For Marxists, the “evil
genius” theory just won’t do.
Original
Sin?
For Camejo, the
methodology of Barnes was rooted in a sectarian quality inherent in Trotskyism
itself — which then caused him to carry out the quest for relevance in a
hopelessly sectarian manner — changing one rigid “orthodoxy” (a Trotskyism
distinct from the revolutionary Trotsky) for another (a Castroism
distinct from the revolutionary Fidel). The crisis arose in the organization as
early as 1970, in Camejo’s opinion, with the choice
facing the SWP being either to go “forward, evolving into an organization
connected with the realities of the national and international living struggles
of real people; or inward, self-isolating from realities because those
realities did not correspond to a preconceived idea ordained as the
unchangeable truth.” (114, 115)
Camejo was transformed by the
international work he did in Latin America in the late 1970s. Sent by the SWP
to Nicaragua in 1979, he was able to see a mass, popular revolution up close
and personal. He describes a young militant of the newly victorious FSLN
(Sandinista National Liberation Front), addressing the laboring poor in a
Managua barrio:
As he spoke it dawned on me. The way he communicated, the message
he gave, was what I had always tried to say; but he used only clear,
understandable words about his message built on the living history of Nicaragua
and the consciousness of the workers and their families who were listening.
He explained how Nicaragua belongs to its own people. How rich
foreigners had come and taken their country from them but that they were the
people who worked and created the wealth of their nation. They had the right to
run it and to decide what should be done. He spoke about the homeless children
in the streets and how under the U.S.-backed dictatorship nothing was done for
them. He described in detail how the FSLN was trying to solve each problem.
That it would take time. That Nicaragua was still in danger of foreign
intervention. To never forget those who gave their lives so that Nicaragua
could be a free nation. At each mention of the departed, the crowd shouted, “Presente,” to affirm that the missing ones were
still with them, here. At every meeting of the Sandinistas, regardless where it
was held, someone would read off the names of people from that block, school,
or union who had given their lives for freedom. Everyone at the meeting would
shout “Presente.”
My mind began to race. Of course this young man was not going to
use terms that would lead to confusion; he would place these issues in the
culture, history, and language of his people. It dawned on me — that is why
this movement had won. They didn’t name their newspaper after some term from
European history; they didn’t speak of “socialism” or “Marxism.” While the rest
of the left of the 1960s and ‘70s was in decline throughout Latin America,
caught up in the rhetoric of European Marxism and the influence of Stalinism,
the FSLN had delivered a great victory for freedom. (Camejo,
170–171)
Camejo describes this experience as a “tipping
point” for him, and while the SWP leadership was willing to place Fidelista and Sandinista certainties into its “program” (chucking the erstwhile Trotskyist
certainties), it seemed incapable of emulating the example of being connected
with living struggle. In one of the book’s few glaring errors, however, Camejo incorrectly characterizes the position of the Fourth
International majority, led by Ernest Mandel, as being hypercritical and even
hostile to the Sandinistas — which might strengthen his point, if true, but
whose inaccuracy throws the overarching point into question. (There are some
who would criticize the pro-Sandinista attitude of both the Fourth
International majority and of Camejo as a betrayal of
the Trotskyist program — which might cause him to
say: “See, that’s what I’m talking
about.”)
The approach that Camejo criticizes
is reflected in a comment Farrell Dobbs made to him: “The program
has been developed. Our job is to implement it.” Evans reports a similar
comment from Barnes (before his Fidelista
revelation): “One day Jack and I were talking in
the headquarters and he told me his opinion that all serious theoretical work
had been completed by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky and there was nothing
for future generations to do but apply the existing theory to specific
political situations.” Camejo appropriately notes
that this is “contrary to the essence of Marx’ writings about the materialist
basis of science and how it applies to economic and social relations. Science
is a process, not a discovery or revelation by a genius. Not only is a
political program an evolving concept, but it also
requires continuous discussion and debate in order for it to be effective. And
it must, most important of all, be tested against reality.” (Camejo, 115; Evans, 226)
Such an open and critical-minded approach can also be found — explicitly
stated — in the writings of George Breitman and Joe
Hansen, regardless of whether one agrees with some of their conclusions. But Evans reports on some similar stirrings from U.S. Trotskyist patriarch James P. Cannon in 1964–65. “The
party is too ingrown,”
he said. “It has become intolerant of differences of opinion. It doesn’t work
with real people in the world. All of its activities are self-generated — Militant sales drives, election campaigns for
our own candidates, forums in our own hall of ourselves talking to ourselves.
This isn’t a way to build a live organization. If this goes
on much longer the party will cease to exist.” He went on: “I haven’t
said anything publicly in the party because I haven’t seen an issue where these
sectarian tendencies could be corrected and I didn’t want to undermine Farrell
and Tom. But now there is one.”
Evans continues: “Here Jim produced a pamphlet called The Triple
Revolution written by the futurist Robert Theobald
and published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa
Barbara. The three revolutions supposed to be taking place in the world were in
the growth of atomic weaponry, in struggles for human rights, but mainly in
automation, leading, Theobald argued, to massive
structural unemployment in the near term.” Cannon asked Evans to take up these
issues and to write about them in the party on his behalf. (Evans, 154)
When it became known to Barnes that Evans was moving in this
direction, he let it be known that such a thing would not be welcome — but also
Evans concluded, after some investigation, that Theobald
and Cannon were wrong, and he dropped the matter. Cannon himself — satisfied
that the SWP’s energetic engagement with building the
antiwar movement was shifting the party in an outward-moving direction — set
the Triple Revolution discussion aside, without repudiating its importance.
What is clear is that the “original sin” that Camejo perceives — while identifying a genuine problem — is
overstated and by itself inadequate in explaining the SWP disaster.
Les Evans reaches for a different variant of “original
sin” to help explain the SWP disaster — Leninism. To make this case, he offers
a set of authoritarian quotations from Lenin’s Collected Works from the civil war period of 1918–1920 and
concludes: “Lenin, as his published works
showed, was committed to an extreme Jacobin dictatorship over the whole of
society to remold it to his vision.” (Evans, 285) He goes on to assert:
The general pattern internationally was that most of the FI sections
that had sided with Cannon and the SWP in the 1953 split were of the hard party
type, while those led by the Europeans were looser, as a legacy of having been
committed to deep entry in larger left parties in the 1950s. The hard parties
with their super centralist structures more often than not ended up with a mad
captain at the helm, sailing ahead with seeming unanimity among the ranks until
they hit the iceberg. Witness Healy in England, Moreno in
Argentina, or the still long surviving cult around Pierre Lambert in France.
This centralist and ideologically intolerant structure seemed to produce the
same result not only for little parties but for national states both great and
small, as witness Stalinist Russia, Enver Hoxha’s Albania, Mao’s China, and Ceausescu’s Romania to
name a few. In the case of the state rulers the Trotskyists
attributed everything to the virus of Stalinism, which in turn they explained
by the economic privileges of the party bureaucracy in an economy of scarcity.
This neatly exempted them from any charge of similarity. Yet the same
totalitarian virus decimated the various Trotskyist parties
in the 1970s and 1980s, at least those of the hard Leninist sort. Draw your own
conclusion. (294)
There is much scholarship that
would need to be confronted and refuted (or reinterpreted) to make this
interpretation of Lenin stick. The desperate and often disastrous “emergency
measures” of the Bolsheviks during the civil war period and its immediate
aftermath do not provide a fair characterization of Leninist organizational
principles as they actually developed from 1902 to 1917. What passed for good “Leninism”
under Stalin and his disciples (or under Barnes and other sectarian cultists)
is another matter. The fact remains, what Evans tells us about the
organizational perspectives of Cannon, and of the SWP during the period of
Cannon’s leadership, does not harmonize well with his generalization — or with
any notion of Leninism á la Cannon
leading to the Barnes disaster.
In a conversation in Cannon’s home in the early 1960s,
Evans commented on a dissident in the YSA, suggesting “we would be better off
if we could get him out.” Cannon asked: “Does he do anything for the movement?”
Evans conceded that, yes, he “read French and
had presented a talk on Ernest Mandel’s Marxist Economic Theory, which
was not yet available in an English translation.” Cannon responded sternly, “Well,
that is something. The party is a voluntary organization. You can’t hire and
fire in the party. If you lose an experienced person you can’t go out on the
street and hire a replacement. You have to conserve what you have.” (Evans,
162) Or consider his description of the 1963 national convention of the SWP:
I now had my first chance to observe how party discussions and
internal democracy worked. Mimeographed internal bulletins began to arrive from
New York. All party members were permitted to write their views, to be printed
in the bulletin during the preconvention period and, if it involved a
resolution, to be put up for a vote at the coming convention. This was an
internal discussion, however; all party members were expected to present the
majority line when speaking to nonmembers.
There were some factions that were spread as minorities within
several branches, and two that controlled their branches outright. The first
type included a group around Jim Robertson and Tim Wohlforth,
who dismissed the Cuban Revolution as an authoritarian nationalist event and
who were opposed to the reunification with the International Secretariat. Another
faction supported Arne Swabeck, one of the original
founders of the movement, who lived in Los Angeles and had become convinced
that Mao Zedong represented a true socialist tendency.
There was a small group in Detroit who thought the Soviet Union was
some kind of new capitalist state as contrasted with the party majority
position that it was defined by the nationalized property and only the
bureaucratic government needed to be removed. The two factions that had their
whole branch behind them were in Seattle, led by Dick Fraser and Clara Kaye,
who championed “revolutionary integration” for the black movement and opposed
any support of black nationalism, and in Milwaukee,
led by James Bolton, who had a pro-Maoist position similar to that of Swabeck. Articles defending and opposing these variegated
viewpoints filled many thick mimeographed bulletins. Also there were a few very
long, almost incomprehensible, articles larded with abstruse organic and early
computer analogies signed by a single individual, Lynn Marcus. When I asked
about him I was told his real name was Lyndon La Rouche
and his party name was an immodest contraction based on Lenin and Marx. . . . I
had spoken before the branch that spring to propose that the militant black
nationalism of the Muslims was a progressive force that should be supported
despite their strident antiwhite rhetoric. This was
met with general skepticism. I felt vindicated when the main party resolution,
titled “Freedom Now,” written by George Breitman in
Detroit, called for support to black nationalism and the Nation of Islam. (130–131)
At the same time, Evans was struck by “the heat of the majority
supporters’ hostility to all the minority tendencies,” and this would culminate
— finally — in an organizational tightening under the Dobbs/Kerry regime as part
of the leadership transition to the Barnes regime. Yet he notes that Cannon had
disagreements with “the tightening up process that Jack Barnes had been
shepherding through the national structure.” (131, 234) After Cannon’s death,
Evans was assigned to go through his papers in order to help compose and edit
new volumes of his writings. His comments, again, give the sense of a different
Leninism than is described in the sweeping generalization:
Reading over fifty years of Cannon’s letters several things struck
me. In the early sixties in Los Angeles I had seen that he held meetings of the
local National Committee members and outraged New York by sending in policy proposals
in the name of the Los Angeles NC group, like a dual Political Committee. I
always assumed that dated only from his somewhat early retirement to Los
Angeles in 1950. Not so. In 1936 the Trotskyists had
dissolved their organization to join the Socialist Party with the aim of
connecting with a developing left wing. During most of 1937 Cannon lived in
California, and from there he repeatedly upstaged the elected leadership of his
group in New York, mailing out counterproposals to theirs to the faction
national committee. This wouldn’t have been tolerated for a minute in the
Barnes-led SWP. Sharp exchanges took place openly between leaders of the Cannon
faction without hiding them from other tendencies in the Trotskyist
group. Another thing that struck me was Cannon’s attitude toward former
factional opponents. A surprising number of his close associates and even
friends had earlier been bitter enemies: Sylvia Bleeker
and Morris Lewitt, Joseph Hansen, and Art Sharon were
all members of the Shachtman faction or, worse yet,
part of the clique around Martin Abern, one of the
three original Trotskyist leaders, infamous for his
onionskin copies of leadership documents that went out regularly to his select
list.
Cannon’s two closest friends seemed to be Ray Dunne in Minneapolis,
who had always been a Cannonite, but the other was
Joseph Vanzler, party name John G. Wright, who was
described in a May 1933 letter to Cannon from George Clarke as “the vanguard of
the freaks” and a supporter of the B. J. Field minority . . . . All of these
people became part of the party’s central leadership without prejudice over
their former alignments. No such thing ever happened under Barnes. Anyone who
opposed him was forever marked and generally quickly expelled. (Evans, 233)
At one point, a Barnes loyalist threatened Evans around pursuing
the Triple Revolution thesis with the
comment: “The Political Committee has had a meeting about that and has ruled
that it is prohibited to discuss it. Cannon is completely out of line to try to
raise it and if he pursues it any further he will be expelled. You had better
shut up about it.” While Evans learned from a more seasoned comrade that “no
one was going to expel Jim Cannon from the SWP,” he concluded that this meant “Barnes
didn’t have the power to do everything he might want to do.” (Evans, 156) More,
it suggests a qualitative difference between the Leninism of Cannon’s party and
that of the Barnes regime.
Digging Deeper
If “the
inherent sectarianism of the Trotskyist program” and “the
inherent authoritarianism of Leninist organizational principles” do not provide
the answer to the question of the qualitative change in the SWP, where can we
look?
For
any Marxist group that wishes to bring about revolutionary change, one obvious
question — if one is a Marxist — is “what is its relationship with the
organized working class?” Camejo comments:
Unions, which at one point had organized 33 percent of American
labor, had shrunk to just 12 percent. No major political opposition appeared. Yes,
there were many defensive struggles as the industrial unions were weakened by
corporate and governmental attacks, which had stepped up under Reagan. But
labor had no labor party or any kind of effective defense strategy. By the
early 1980s the industrial working class and its unions had been in a sharp
decline for two obvious, interconnected reasons. First was the growth of
globalization; second was the union capitulation to the Democratic Party. At
every level the unions, pushed by the Democratic Party, were capitulating,
supposedly a necessary step for U.S. corporations to be competitive in the
global economy. (173)
The
world had changed in important ways, and the SWP leadership — with few and
marginal exceptions — didn’t see it coming. Indeed, it might have made sense if
the SWP had actually looked more
carefully and thoughtfully at the dynamics of “Triple Revolution” that Jim
Cannon vainly pointed to. The automation and computerization discussed in that
document did not bring mass unemployment in the immediate term, but they did
contribute to the steady erosion of the industrial working-class base that had
been the source of traditional union power — and these developing technologies
were very much related to what came to be tagged “globalization.” (The
so-called “revolutions” in human rights and in weaponry also moved in slower
and more complex — but no less transformative — ways.)
One
must also give attention to the “great divide” represented by the Second World
War, which brought into being a very different world than the one framing the
perspectives of Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades. Young SWP and YSA members —
reading the “classic” texts that had been written in qualitatively different
contexts, and themselves having come into adulthood and consciousness in very
different social-cultural contexts — could not easily grasp the actual meaning
of what Lenin or Trotsky might be saying. But they did not know that. This
naturally contributed to a stilted understanding of the texts, contributing to
flattened and simplistic applications, and to growing disorientation.
Related
to this, the vanguard layers of the working class — at least in the United
States — had been nurtured by a labor
radical subculture from the post–Civil War era of the 1860s down to the
1940s. The cadres of the early SWP had been shaped by and were an integral part
of that labor radical subculture. But the class-conscious working-class layers were
fragmented and eroded by the profound economic, political, cultural, social,
and economic changes of the post–World War II period — whose components included
a fierce and stultifying Cold War anti-Communism, an unprecedented relative
prosperity, working-class suburbanization, transformations in an increasingly
conformist mass popular culture, and more. The subculture of the radicalized
sections of the labor movement, and those radicalized sections of the labor
movement themselves, were no longer a vibrant reality as young members flowed
into the SWP and YSA in the 1960s and early ’70s.
In Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder,
Lenin emphasizes that efforts by would-be revolutionaries to maintain “iron
discipline” if their Marxism and organization are not actually rooted in vanguard
layers of the working class and intimately connected with mass struggles, “inevitably
fall flat and end up in phrase-mongering and clowning.” One might say that this
is precisely the essence of the “Barnesism” emerging
from the accounts of Camejo and Evans.
Some
left critics may be inclined to see Barnes’s adaptation to the Cuban and
Nicaraguan revolutionaries as the opposite of “ultraleftism”
(instead reflecting a submission to “the conservative elements of those
national programs”), which gets into analyses of the Cuban and Nicaraguan
revolutions that are beyond the scope of this review. But Lenin’s decisive
point — that no “Leninism” is possible if there is a
disconnect between would-be revolutionaries and the actualities of
working-class life and struggle — points up the fatal problem that faced and
finally overwhelmed the SWP. The lack of possibility for democratic correction,
due to the deepening authoritarianism and cultism represented by the Barnes
regime, sealed its fate. Perhaps all this was not inevitable — but that is the
way it happened.*
Aftermath
In reaction to their experiences in the Trotskyist
movement, the two authors went down different pathways.
Evans participated in two efforts to pick up some of the political
pieces after the mass expulsions from the SWP — helping to found, in turn,
Socialist Action and Solidarity, both of which still exist as fairly small
groups. Before the end of the 1980s, he had given up on socialist activism and —
essentially — on socialism and Marxism altogether. Acquiring additional skills
and knowledge upon returning to university life, he went on to play an
impressive role as a web journalist for the International Institute associated
with University of California Los Angeles, as well as a staff member with the
World Health Organization and the World Bank (of all things). Also he and his
wife have been quite active in their local neighborhood committee’s highly
focused efforts to protect their own community in South Los Angeles, contending
with “gang crime, illegal dumping, graffiti vandals, drug houses, and abandoned
buildings.” Evans seems defensive about this, and goes on the offensive: “For Trotskyists all politics is global. If it doesn’t involve a
foreign war for which imperialism can be excoriated, or a union-busting
multinational corporation, it is hardly worth talking about.” (Evans, 399) There
is an element of truth to this — but it is not totally true, in my opinion.
Camejo was unable to
give up on the radical activism that animated most of his life. He joined
together in the mid-1980s with a short-lived “non-sectarian” left-wing group
called the North Star Network, made up of former SWPers
and other radicals. The group ended up getting involved in Jesse Jackson’s
Rainbow Coalition — which he considers “a major political mistake” since it
became “just another name for keeping progressives in the Democratic Party.” (Camejo, 180–181) One of the appendices of his book contains
an analytical critique entitled “The Origins of the Two-Party System.” He also
established ties with a breakaway from the Communist Party, Committees of
Correspondence, and with a Maoist-influenced group called Line of March — but
concluded that intertwined vestiges of Stalinism and reformism hindered both
from becoming effective left-wing forces.
For
a time, thanks to considerable expertise on the capitalist economy, he worked
very successfully for the investment firm of Merrill Lynch. From there he
branched out into helping left-leaning people make “socially responsible”
investments, and also with raising substantial amounts of money — through his
business and financial contacts — for such things as fighting
AIDS, job creation, immigrant rights, unionization, and protection of the
environment. He became perhaps the most dynamic — and one of the most radical —
figures in the Green Party of California, running for Governor and then
becoming Ralph Nader’s Vice-Presidential running mate in 2004. While raising
questions about using the word socialism, and insisting that Marx should not be
treated uncritically as a deity, he continued to embrace the socialist goal
(preferring the term “economic democracy”) and a broadly Marxist analytical
framework.
Both
Camejo and Evans appear to have ended up with wives
whom they have loved and who love them, children, grandchildren, and
interesting personal experiences, some of which are discussed or alluded to in
their books. And both felt a need to share their reflections about U.S.
Trotskyism with readers whom they knew would be mostly on the Left — which is
our good fortune.
[Thanks
to various friends for feedback and help in making corrections, especially
those around the on-line journal Labor Standard.]