Reflections on Peter Camejo (1939-2008)

(These are some personal/political reflections about Peter Camejo. Tomorrow I will be writing an obit for Swans.)

Even though I had steeled myself in anticipation of Peter Camejo’s death, I was still shaken by the news that he was gone. For a period of time between 1981 and 1987, I considered Peter to be a very good friend. More importantly, he was the one person who helped me understand a revolution could be made in the U.S. notwithstanding American Trotskyism’s tendency to create all sorts of obstacles in the way to that understanding. Despite his long-time membership in a group that he would eventually regard as an obstacle to the creation of genuine revolutionary movement, Peter always had an ability to transcend sectarian frameworks.

In early 1970, I was in the New York branch of the SWP and kicking around the idea of going back to graduate school and putting this organization behind me. After 3 years I felt alienated from the membership and many of the arbitrary norms and was ready to pack it in. When I broached the subject with the SWP organizer in New York, he told me that the party was about to ask me to move up to Boston and work with Peter to overcome dogmatic objections in the branch to working in a “petty bourgeois” antiwar movement. I felt flattered that the higher ups would see any value in my skills and agreed to move there in a few weeks.

As some of you know, I have been working on a comic book memoir for the past few months and Peter looms large throughout the story. Here’s what I wrote about one branch meeting:

In early 1970 a memorable fight broke out at a branch meeting over what position to take on the “Shea Bill”. The 31 year old James Shea, a state legislator, had proposed that Massachusetts authorize residents to refuse combat duty in wars that were undeclared by Congress, including Vietnam. It would also authorize the state Attorney General Robert Quinn to use the powers of his office to defend soldiers who challenged the military and indeed Quinn filed suit against the war on February 12, 1970 on behalf of 12 local soldiers who refused orders to go to Vietnam.

Someone took the floor and spoke against the Shea Bill:

“Comrades, it puts undue faith in the bourgeois state to back such a law. It fosters pacifist illusions about the war ending through legislation. We know that it will take the power of the working class to end the war, not the Shea bill. We all know that Shea is only interested in getting people off the streets and supporting the Democratic Party.”

Peter got up next to reply. I remember his comments vividly now after 36 years, just like it was yesterday.

Comrades, Lenin used to stay up late at night reading the Czarist law codes to look for a loophole that would allow workers to go out on strike legally. We must take advantage of any opening that would make it more difficult for the war to continue. If the ruling class is divided over the war, we want to deepen that divide. The Shea Bill should not be seen as opposed to antiwar demonstrations, but complementary to them.

Peter’s motion to support the Shea Bill carried that evening, but in the end it was academic since the courts ruled it unconstitutional. In any case, the notion that James Shea was some kind of Machiavellian schemer trying to defuse the antiwar movement was belied by subsequent events. On May 8, 1970, in deep despair over the war, he went upstairs to his bedroom. His wife, who was worried about his depressed state, opened the door to see him raise a gun and fire a bullet into his head. He died immediately.

For the two years Peter was branch organizer, I felt that there was no better way to live one’s life than as a revolutionary socialist, which meant as a member of the SWP.

I have to confess that I developed a kind of hero worship for Peter and he probably knew it. He was five years older than me and seemed to enjoy my company. When we were up in Boston, we used to play squash together at the Cambridge Y. And when conventions or conferences were held in Oberlin, Peter and I always found time to spend on the courts. Besides his acute political intelligence, Peter was one of the funniest people I ever knew in my life. Although I don’t put myself in his league politically, I did feel that my own sense of humor helped sustain our friendship.

In late 1978, I decided to quit the SWP. I felt that the party was still going to lead the working class to socialism, but I was too burned out by the “turn” to stick around. I was going to go back to N.Y. and write the Great American Novel. (That’s my sense of humor kicking in again.)

For a couple of years I read the Militant with a mounting sense that the SWP was not really involved with actions against the U.S. war in Central America even though the paper was filled with articles about the growing conflict. After a N.Y. Times article written by Leslie Gelb predicting a new Vietnam in the region appeared in 1981, I called an old friend who was still in the party to demand an explanation. How could the party that I joined in 1967 largely on the basis of its antiwar activity sit on the sidelines, even if in the name of looming trade union struggles (that never materialized, I should add.)

In 1980 I ran into a guy named Ray Markey in a pizza parlor across from my building on the Upper East Side and asked him if he could explain the party’s abstention. I had no idea what he thought of the “turn” to industry but I always remembered Ray as a straight shooter. Ray was a colorful Irish-American with a temper worse than mine and a long-time leader of the librarian’s union in N.Y. I would eventually learn that he refused to work in a New Jersey auto plant that the party was colonizing, understanding that his leadership in the librarian’s union counted for a lot more, even if the party brass disagreed.

He told me that Peter Camejo had written something that would answer my questions. It was titled appropriately enough “Against Sectarianism“. He would send me a copy even though that broke party rules. Ray understood that he would be booted out before long himself and really didn’t care about the consequences.

“Against Sectarianism” hit me like a bolt of lightning. Peter used the same brilliant political analysis that I saw at work in Boston and applied to the party that he had belonged to for more than 20 years. It was powerfully argued and used the rapier like wit that defined him. Here is a passage that had hit home for me as an unreconstructed “petty bourgeois” element who had failed to make the turn to industry.

Barnes continued: “That is without doubt what is happening on the U.S. left as the blows against the working class come down, as the polarization deepens, and as the imperialist war pressure mounts. The difference between conditions and consciousness borne of being a worker and that produced by being immersed in a petty-bourgeois milieu is widening. And the ranks of the North American marielitos- with Susan Sontag and her ilk leading the scramble for the boats-are growing.”

At an earlier date, Barnes used the example of Jerry Rubin as an example of the marielito phenomena. Rubin, a colorful protester during the anti-Vietnam war period who was associated with the “Yippies,” took a job on Wall Street and argued in defense of capitalism. The New York Times made a great deal of Rubin’s new job and gave him plenty of space to explain his views. The New York Times was overjoyed to find at least one figure from the radicalization of the ’60s who would speak in favor of capitalism. The Times’ campaign around Rubin fooled only a few people, probably because the Times did not follow up with other examples or any comments supporting or endorsing Rubin’s outlook by other well-known leaders of the ’60s.

The radicals of the ’60s have not, as a whole, turned to the right. Caught in the beginnings of a class polarization, the generation of the ’60s has gone in various directions. Some, under the pressures of bourgeois society and without any clear orientation, have abandoned political activity or become conservatized. Others have not, and their views cover the spectrum of positions existing at this stage of the radicalization in North American society.

Sensing that Peter had developed such a critique of the party, he was prevented from assuming his duties after a year long stay at his father’s ranch in Venezuela which he understood to be a leave of absence and nothing else. He went to Venezuela to read Lenin and try to figure out how the SWP had developed a caricature of what the Bolsheviks were trying to do. Peter thought that the Bolsheviks were nothing like the SWP. For one thing, they had expelled only one person in their entire history unlike the purge-happy Trotskyist movement.

When he got back to N.Y. to begin work with the party again, they told him to get lost. They actually had a beefy ex-football player from the University of Minnesota block Peter from entering a national committee meeting.

I called Peter immediately after reading the article and asked him what he had planned next since I wanted to be a part of it. It turned out that he was starting something called the North Star Network and I began to organize meetings at my house for people who were interested. More importantly, he advised me to join CISPES (the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) since that was where the action was. Peter had a keen sense of what Karl Marx once wrote to Bracke: “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”

Eventually my involvement with Central America led me to a trip to Nicaragua in 1986 and participation in Tecnica, a radical version of the Peace Corps that played a critical role in Nicaragua and Southern Africa in the late 80s and early 90s.

Whenever I made it out to Berkeley to consult with Tecnica board members, I always would hook up with Peter and talk about where the movement was going. Those conversations were as precious to me as any that I have had in my lifetime and some can be found in my own memoir.

In a very real sense, everything that I am politically today was shaped directly by my apprenticeship/collaboration with Peter in the SWP and afterwards. I understand that Peter died with only half of the final chapter of his memoir unwritten. Thank god for that since I am quite sure that it will succeed both as politics to live by as well as great entertainment. Peter was a great person to be around when he was alive and his book will keep our memories of him alive as long as we live as well.