Barry Sheppard, Peter Camejo, and the role of the revolutionary party

Unless you are a member of the tiny SWP (reported to be about 125 members) or part of their formal supporter’s network, made up mostly of burned out ex-members, you will agree that the collapse of this once powerful left group is of Hindenburgian dimensions. Such a spectacular fall has been the subject of books and articles, both on and off the Internet. I have probably written about 150 pages on the topic including some material that was transformed into a chapter in a comic book memoir done in collaboration with the sorely missed Harvey Pekar.

My memoir is played mostly for laughs, but it shares the analysis found in Peter Camejo’s “North Star” and the article on democratic centralism by Joaquin Bustelo posted to this blog yesterday, namely that Marxist-Leninist “vanguardism” is to blame. There is something in this party-building cookbook dating back to the early 1920s that leads to sect and cult formation. It led not only to the collapse of the SWP but literally hundreds of other Trotskyist and Maoist groups that once dominated the political scene in the 60s and 70s. From the ex-Maoist perspective, Max Elbaum’s “Revolution in the Air” covers a lot of the same terrain.

Les Evans, a leader of the SWP until his expulsion in the early 80s and editor of Peter’s memoir, bases his explanation of the demise of the SWP on the earlier traditions of “the god that failed”. In other words, it is Marxism itself to blame rather than a misapplication. Of course, there is an odd disjunction between Evans’s fear of the revolutionary party assuming totalitarian control of American society and the SWP’s self-destruction. If the SWP had 25,000 members and was growing rapidly, then his updated version of Arthur Koestler might make sense. But one senses that if the SWP had ever achieved such proportions, Les Evans—always the avid careerist—would have remained a member.

Volume one of Barry Sheppard’s memoir, that covers the period from 1960 to 1973, appeared in 2005, amounting to an official history of the SWP along the same lines as the self-vindicating “History of American Trotskyism” by party founder James P. Cannon. Now, after five years, volume two has still not appeared. If it is never written, that would be understandable since the period covered would include some truly traumatic material. The organization that Barry put nearly 30 years into building has turned into a bizarre cult around Jack Barnes, the man who purged Sheppard, Camejo and Evans.

Leaving aside the psychological pain this would entail, there is also the problem of how to explain the downfall. One assumes that given Barry’s critique of Peter’s memoir that he will adopt some sort of bad seed analysis that was broadly accepted by the older generation of SWP leaders who went into opposition against Barnes in the early 80s. Rather than a structural analysis, it stresses Barnes’s character flaws that were exacerbated by a decline of the mass movement in the post-Vietnam war era.  Frank Lovell, a courageous and principled SWP dissident who took on Barnes and who died in 1998, put it this way:

Some SWP members who were closely associated with Barnes became suspicious of him and thought they detected signs of psychosis in the early 1980s. It was clear at that time that he had serious character defects, but it was not until the end of the decade that his pontifications on events of the day indicated a break with reality. At precisely what point the cult complex became the general characteristic of the SWP is not easily determined, but the degenerative process paralleled the decline in party membership and the gradual shrinking of its periphery. Throughout the decade of the 1980s its influence in the radical movement, especially among Latin American support groups and within the so-called anti-imperialist movement, gradually dried up.

In other words, if the SWP had a leader who was not psychotic, like Barry Sheppard perhaps, it would have had a different fate. Of course, the more interesting question is why Trotskyism keeps breeding such nutty leaders. The American SWP and the British Socialist Labor League were defenders of “orthodox” Trotskyism against the dicey liquidationist tendencies of the “Pabloite” Ernest Mandel wing of the Fourth International in the 1950s and both ended up with madmen at the helm. In the case of the SLL, you had Gerry Healy—a sexual predator who accused friend and foe alike of being CIA agents.

But craziness was not limited to the Cannonite wing of the FI. In Latin America, you had one J. Posadas (nee Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli) who advocated a preemptive nuclear strike against the USA by the USSR and who believed that UFO sightings confirmed the existence of a higher civilization—communist, to be sure—on other planets.

Trotskyism does not have a monopoly on bizarre cult formations if you’ve ever come in contact with Robert Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party or any number of tiny “Marxist-Leninist” groups seeking to emulate Lenin’s party in the same way that a mental patient declares that he is Napoleon Bonaparte.

Barry Sheppard’s review would surely be of interest to the members of the ISO whose Haymarket Press has published both his and Peter’s memoir. When Barry spoke at the Brecht Forum in NYC in 2005, I ran into some ISO members who told me that they were studying the SWP carefully both in terms of its successes and as a cautionary tale of what to avoid. Barry had clearly earned their respect, as had Peter Camejo who had been a keynote speaker at their conferences and who worked closely with their members in the Green Party.

It would also be of interest to the Democratic Socialist Perspective in Australia, a group that has been moving cautiously away from Cannonite orthodoxy so much so that they endured a split not too long ago by members who would go on to form the Revolutionary Socialist Party led by John Percy. Percy and his late brother Jim were founding members of a group that worked closely with the American SWP and who would agree with Barry that the problems of the SWP have nothing to do with its Cannoite roots. Indeed, it is those roots that must be returned to, which for Jim Percy and Barry Sheppard amount to something like the Garden of Eden legend. Before the leaders of the DSP and the SWP ate from the forbidden fruit of anti-Leninist liquidationism, everything was good. Now it is bad.

Barry begins by defending the older Trotskyist cadre against Peter’s charge that they were nervous about the party’s drift in the 1960s and 70s. Peter wrote:

Many of the older members opposed our support for what they saw as contemporary issues, such as gay liberation, and in general were nervous that the SWP might abandon its roots in Trotskyism and begin to alter its ‘program.’

Barry rejects the idea that the older, working class leaders of the SWP were nervous about the middle-class youth who had come into its ranks. In their defense, he points to their embrace of Malcolm X, the Cuban Revolution and many other struggles of the 1960s that were unlike the 1930s trade union struggles they participated in.

To an extent this is true, but Barry must have forgotten how the entire party leadership—including him—saw the “turn toward industry” as the end of a detour. In the late 1970s, some stirrings in the trade union movement that Farrell Dobbs always referred to as “heat lightning” were taken as a green light to reorient the party toward its historic roots. The 1960s social struggles would not be abandoned—thank goodness—they would just be conducted through the trade union movement. In other words, the older SWP leadership did not have a hostile attitude toward Black Nationalism, etc. as was the case with the Spartacist League. That is true enough. It had only decided that they would be fighting for these causes in a new arena, this despite the fact that the trade union movement as a movement was practically non-existent.

Barry is also troubled by Peter’s understanding of program, something that is put in scare quotes for a good reason in the quotation above. Barry explains his differences with Peter this way:

Peter makes some correct generalizations: “Not only is a political program an evolving concept, but it requires continuous discussion and debate in order for it to be effective. And it must, most important of all, be tested against reality. In other words, the program of an organization trying to bring justice to the world must be a process rooted primarily in the living mass struggles of the people.” But his next sentence reads, “It is not a written document put together by intelligent people in the past.”

Marxist written documents “from the past,” beginning with the Communist Manifesto, are essential to understand the present and to effectively intervene in it. The “living mass struggles” of the present grow out of those of the past. The written programmatic documents of Marxism are rich with the lessons of these past struggles. They do show development of course, since they reflect changing reality, but they also provide continuity. Neither reality nor Marxist theory (program is another word for theory) is always just coming into existence independent of the past.

Well, Barry is simply wrong—that is, at least if he is trying to define how program was understood in the SWP when we were both members. It was not another word for theory, nor was it understood as literature like the Communist Manifesto being “useful” for understanding the present.

Instead, the program was synonymous with a virtual encyclopedia of historical and international positions that people were recruited to. If you were around an SWP headquarters in the 1960s and 70s when young people were joining by the dozens each month, you clearly understood that program of the SWP rested on these foundation stones:

1. Permanent revolution: Trotsky’s belief that only socialism could fulfill the tasks of the colonial revolution in the epoch of imperialism.

2. The USSR as “degenerated workers state”, with such ancillary categories as “deformed” and “healthy”. One might feel as if you had wandered into a clinic when you heard such terms bandied about.

3. A ton of other positions that flowed from these, including what position to take on the internecine struggles in Angola, the character of the FLN in Algeria, the Kronstadt revolt, etc. Once you had developed the ability to articulate a forceful defense of the party positions on such questions in public, you were a cadre.

Peter came to the conclusion after many years that such “programmatic” considerations were not only unnecessary but also harmful. In my discussions with him in the early 80s, he stressed over and over the need to focus like a laser beam on the problems facing us in the American class struggle and to develop an idiom that would be understood by the American people. Indeed, this is the reason he did not get involved in the futile attempts by Frank Lovell et al to defend the SWP “program” against Jack Barnes’s supposed Castroite deviations (sigh, if that were only the case.) When I told him in one of our initial phone calls that I was upset about the rejection of permanent revolution, he said, “Louis, of course you are right to be upset. Trotsky was correct. But the issue is Trotskyism, not Trotsky.”

Rather than come to terms with Peter’s party-building ideas that have been articulated in various places in “North Star” and in articles like “Against Sectarianism” and “Return to Materialism”, Barry sets himself up as the defender of Marxism against Peter, who is portrayed as some kind of pragmatist. While Barry’s tone is not as vitriolic as James P. Cannon’s or Leon Trotsky, one cannot escape feeling that he is reenacting the Shachtman-Burnham fight.

Peter’s position appears to reject the basic program of Marxism. He writes that Marx was right on many things. “Marx said human history can be understood like any other scientific process,” he says. He goes on to list other positive aspects of Marx’s thought. “Marx raised the idea that humans can transcend the brutality, violence, and abuse that have characterized most of human society for at least the past few thousand years. He laid out a view that attempted to tie society’s past evolution to how it might evolve in the future.”

Peter nowhere affirms Marx’s program, and appears to reject it by omission. That is, he rejects much more than the SWP’s program. In the place of program and theory he presents an agnostic view: “The science of social change is permanently evolving. We will learn what works – that is what is ‘true’ – by the inevitable conflict of ideas and by testing those ideas against reality.” What “works” is what is “true” – a restatement of American pragmatism. We don’t yet know what “works,” including Marx’s program, Peter seems to be saying.

Well, thank goodness Peter did not “affirm” Marx’s program. That was not the kind of book he intended to write. On the idea that “the science of social change is permanently evolving”, one can only demand that Barry offer proof that somehow Peter’s politics reflected a departure from Marxism. At least when Cannon and Trotsky were flaying James Burham and Max Shachtman, they could at least point out how they had adapted to liberal public opinion on Stalin and the looming world war. They could also document Burnham’s open embrace of non-Marxist philosophy. But to turn “North Star” into something like “The Managerial Revolution” is rather silly.

In Peter’s case, all you have is a declared need to test ideas against reality. Now Barry is welcome to interpret this as philosophical pragmatism, but I see it as a useful reminder to avoid the screwball hothouse atmosphere of groups like the SWP that believed that the late 1970s—the era of trade union decline, disco, cocaine, and student apathy—was ushering in a period of mounting class struggle that would lead to a bid for power. It was the disjunction between the reality of American society and the SWP’s millenarian posturing that finally led me to resign in 1978. My only regret is that it took me so long to wake up to reality. That, of course, is a common complaint of former cult members.

Finally I will say a few words about Barry’s reference to Peter’s allegation that Ernest Mandel and other European Trotskyists backed the Simon Bolivar Brigade in Sandinista Nicaragua, a sectarian formation loyal to Nahuel Moreno, a former ally of the SWP. Barry presents solid evidence that this was not the case. Barry has no explanation for why Peter might have made such an allegation other than the fact that he was ill with cancer when writing the book and very likely had a memory lapse.

I can understand how illness and old age can weaken one’s memory and intellectual powers. I am 65 myself with declining eyesight.

One can only wonder if Barry has been coping with declining memory as well, given his characterization of how Peter found himself outside the SWP. In his review, he states, “Peter left the SWP in 1981.” Now, for most people this means that he left voluntarily as was the case for most people back then, including me.

But in another account, he writes:

In 1981 Peter went on a visit to Venezuela. While he was absent, a meeting of the SWP national committee was held. At that meeting, we were told that Peter had resigned from the party. I didn’t find out until some years later, after I had left the SWP, that this was an outright lie, orchestrated by Barnes, who had always been jealous of Peter’s popularity with the party membership. Over the next years in the 1980s, most of the central leaders were forced out.

This doesn’t sound much like “leaving” in my estimation. But I won’t hold that against Barry. I will only assume that he meant to write something more like this in his review and simply forgot what really happened. My only hope is that he can summon up the energy and the courage to finish volume two of his memoir. The debate over party-building is of intense interest to young activists everywhere and his views are essential to this debate, even if they are wrong.