Behind the collapse of the SWP: a reply to Alan Wald

In the latest issue of Against the Current, a nominally independent magazine that reflects the viewpoint of Solidarity, there is a long (11,562 words) article by Alan Wald on two recent memoirs by former SWP leaders. Since Wald attempts his own post-mortem report on Leon Trotsky’s favorite party that differs from those offered by memoirists Les Evans and Peter Camejo, it is understandable why the article is so long. Ever since I began writing about this topic on the Internet, I probably have devoted something close to 100,000 words. Since this party had an enormous grip on the psyche of its younger members like Wald and me, and since its decline was so precipitous, there is a natural tendency for former members to go on at length. And when those people are writers, who are either professionals like Wald or patzers like me, you can expect buckets and buckets of prose.

Unlike Wald, me, and Les Evans, Peter Camejo was not a writer. Before I present my own analysis of why the SWP turned into a cult, I’d like to say something about Wald’s contemptuous attitude toward Camejo. Since Camejo is dead, he does not have the opportunity to defend himself.

Wald sneers that Camejo’s memoir “North Star” contains no “revelations of new political plans regarding ‘what is to be done.’” What an implicit admission that the reviewer had no idea of what the book was about. Camejo’s main objective in his post-SWP evolution was exactly to avoid such prescriptions. What was Wald expecting? An entry in the appendix titled “A Transitional Program for the 21^st century”?

Following this revelation that there were no revelations in “North Star”, Wald goes all Spartacist on us by claiming: “Camejo champions familiar clichés of the populist Left.” Since Wald is a trained academic with more articles in his CV than spots on a leopard, one might have expected him to cite an example of such “clichés”. When I want to belittle someone, I try to quote the person. This is something I learned from reading Lenin, who liked to hoist people on their own petards. What clichés is Wald referring to, I wonder? If Wald wanted to substantiate this charge, he might have referred to the Avocado Declaration, arguably Peter’s most important written programmatic statement, that includes the following commentary on the New Deal:

One quite popular myth is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was pro labor. Continuing the policies of Woodrow Wilson who oversaw a reign of anti-union terror, including black listing and deporting immigrant labor organizers, FDR’s administration sabotaged union drives every step of the way. When workers overcame their bosses’ resistance and began winning strikes, FDR turned on them and gave the green light for repression after police killed ten striking steel workers in 1937. As FDR said himself, “I’m the best friend the profit system ever had.” After WWII Truman used the new Taft Hartley Anti-Labor Act to break national strikes more than a dozen times.

I could be wrong, but this is exactly the sort of thing I read in a much longer version in Art Preis’s “Labor’s Giant Step”. I really can’t go any further in trying to read Alan Wald’s mind but in the future he should at least try to provide an example of someone’s deviation from Marxism when he sits down to write his next hatchet job. I should add that Barry Sheppard did exactly the same thing in his own review of Camejo’s memoir, which accuses Peter of rejecting “the basic program of Marxism.” A few sentences later he explains that this was the conclusion he drew from the fact that “Peter nowhere affirms Marx’s program”. You might as well accuse me of rejecting sexual intercourse because I never affirm on my blog that I favor it.

In the early 80s Peter once told me that he regretted not having resigned from the SWP a year after he joined. After reading Sheppard, one can understand why. And after reading Wald, maybe that explains why he never joined Solidarity.

Perhaps seeking to settle old scores, Wald identifies the 1971 convention of the SWP as the root of its degeneration. At that convention, the SWP majority went full-blast at a minority that included Wald and that had submitted a document titled “For a Proletarian Orientation”. The minority was referred to as FAPO or PO in the ranks of the majority.

As someone who had a fairly major role in the Boston branch speaking for the SWP majority, I want to offer my own take on the fight.

In late 1969, I met with the SWP organizer in NYC to discuss the possibility of resigning from the group. Although I agreed with the party politically, I felt a general sense of alienation. The organizer, a closeted gay man named Charles Bolduc, came up with a counter-proposal. He urged me to take an assignment to transfer up to Boston and help shore up the SWP majority that was being led by Peter Camejo, the branch organizer. I suppose, looking back in retrospect that I made a Camejo-like mistake in not following through on my decision to drop out.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that the minority in the branch that would organize itself as the FAPO tendency at the next convention was workerist to the core. I had been first exposed to workerist ideas at the New School in 1967, shortly before joining the SWP. A friend from Bard College had become a supporter of the Progressive Labor Party that would go on to constitute itself as the leadership of the Worker-Student Alliance in SDS. Back in 1967, SDS and the PLP were very formidable groups and I had every reason to take them seriously, enough so to go to a “meet the PLP” meeting at Jake Rosen’s apartment in Washington Heights. In hushed tones, my friend told me that Jake was a carpenter. For young radicals wet behind the ears, the fact that someone was a carpenter gave him credibility that a computer programmer or a librarian could never have.

I have vivid recollections of listening to Jake Rosen, as he lay stretched out on his living room sofa picking out the lint from between his toes, telling us over and over that the working class was the only class that could overthrow the bosses and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. I was not bowled over, even though I had a hard time arguing against a proletarian membership. How could anybody who claimed to be a Marxist? Of course, the real question was not about the goal but how to get there.

Not much later, I joined the SWP because the antiwar movement was more important to me than anything. Whatever accusations could be hurled at the SWP, indifference to the need for mass demonstrations was not one of them. But Jake Rosen’s words stuck with me. How would the SWP reach the workers?

A month or two after I joined the party, I discussed this question with Bob DesVerney, a brilliant African-American intellectual who was the author of “Why White Radicals Are Incapable of Understanding Black Nationalism,” a smoking hot polemic against the CP, the SP and other opponents of Black nationalism.

He told me, “The way the SWP will recruit workers is by recruiting lots and lots of students”. That was his provocative way of saying that workers will be attracted to a movement that is getting things done, not because of some professed allegiance to the working class.

About a year later, after I had transferred up to Boston, I witnessed a confirmation of what Bob had been talking about. We had just recruited a guy named John McNamara to the Young Socialist Alliance who had decided to join after hearing Peter Camejo speak on how to make a revolution in the USA. John knew about Camejo from his speech to the rally at Boston Commons on Moratorium Day and liked what he heard.

John had shoulder length blond hair and a beard but was not a student at Boston University despite his appearance. He was in fact a longshoreman and a “Southie”, a denizen of South Boston, the tough and at times racist Irish stronghold.

John went to Oberlin that year for the first conference the SWP ever held there. One night I spotted John sitting in the lobby of the student union building with two large books on his lap. Unlike most SWP’ers, I was always interested in talking to people, especially new members who were as alienated as I had been in my first few months. “Hey, John,” I asked, “what are you reading?” He looked up at me and told me that one book was Marx’s Capital, volume one, and the other was a dictionary that he was using to look up words he didn’t know. John was a high-school dropout so this was not a surprise.

Unlike the FAPO supporters in Boston, John was a real worker. A year before I got up to Boston, the SWP youth had washed their hands of the antiwar movement and had gotten jobs in hospitals where they could hobnob with the PLP/SDS members who were on a colonizing drive.

After Camejo came up to Boston, he persuaded most young people in the branch who were sitting on the fence ideologically on the “workerism” question to commit themselves to the majority orientation. As is the case so often in politics, actions speak louder than words. When you can mobilize 50,000 people into the streets of Boston, that tends to vindicate your ideas.

Not long after John joined, he dropped out. He probably did not feel comfortable around the arrogant student government types in Boston who learned to function from Jack Barnes’s lieutenants and dominated the SWP and YSA. As someone who had been working in an office for a few years, my reality was almost as different from the full-timers as John’s. But at least I had the political understanding to put my discomfort aside.

In 1973, I was asked to take an assignment in Houston where my polemical skills would be deployed against a new threat to the party leadership. Many of the former members of FAPO had organized a new tendency called the IT (Internationalist Tendency) that retained the workerist orientation of FAPO but combined it with the urban guerrilla orientation of the European Trotskyist movement.

The SWP was in an alliance with a group in Argentina led by Nahuel Moreno that we were told was just like us, an orthodox, mass-action oriented party. The Europeans supported a group that was hijacking meat trucks and dispensing the goods to poor people. In my presentation to the branch, I had a good time mocking the guerrillas and their supporters in the branch.

Within two years, the SWP and Moreno had fallen out like rival gang lords on “The Sopranos”. And just a few years after that, the guerrilla movement in Nicaragua had taken power using some of the same adventurist tactics that the majority had derided in Argentina.

Peter Camejo once told me that he had a funny encounter with a Sandinista leader in Nicaragua when he learned that Peter was high up in the Fourth International (this was before the SWP had split with the FI, I believe). The Sandinista clasped his shoulders and told Peter how grateful he was for the support the Trotskyist movement had given the FSLN. Peter was puzzled. He couldn’t remember any kind of material aid. In fact, the SWP had initially been hostile to the FSLN. It turned out, Peter said with a chuckle, that he was talking about the European Trotskyists who had raised some money for machine guns or something like that.

Not long after this encounter, the SWP had become the FSLN’s biggest boosters. And not long after that, it would implement the program of the FAPO, going much further in its workerism than any minority member of the Boston branch would have dreamed possible.

And throughout all these dizzying changes, the one thing that remained consistent was a belief that anybody who challenged the leadership’s wisdom was a petty-bourgeois element who needed either to be convinced of the error of his or her ways or given the boot. This was just as true of the minority leaders as the majority. Larry Trainor, an old-timer in the SWP who trained the young leaders who wrote the FAPO document, would have been just as vicious had he been running the SWP.

I say this as someone who became very close to a couple of the surviving Cochranites who had been ostracized in the same way that FAPO had been in the 1970s. Cynthia Cochran told me about the time that Farrell Dobbs had visited her husband Burt in 1953 to tell him that his days were numbered. She felt sick for days afterwards. And in my conversations with Sol Dollinger, I came to realize how disgusting the charge of “petty-bourgeois” could be. In 1953 most of the Cochranites, including Sol, were autoworkers. When Cannon decided to get rid of them, he accused them of being “embourgeoisified” workers who had gotten disoriented by post-WWII prosperity and high wages.

Furthermore, this is the same crap that was thrown at Max Shachtman and his grouping by Trotsky.

And when you really get down to it, this was the method of the Comintern long before Stalin took over. (For a complete discussion of how this destructive methodology took root, read my article on the Comintern and the German CP.)

Alan Wald believes that this kind of bad behavior was introduced into the party in 1971:

Nevertheless, in the process of the internal political struggle in 1971, the crucial changes occurred that created the new paradigms for handling disputes and precedents for organizational control; the positive traditions of the SWP were shown to be subject to the expedient aims of the new leadership. In other words, the 1971 convention was a “test run.” The patterns it set would be more fully enacted when Barnes and his circle went on to change policies and expel organized oppositions in 1974 and 1982-3, and target other individuals, such as Camejo, along the way and afterwards.

One wonders how things would have turned out if someone a bit less batty than Jack Barnes had been running the SWP, someone maybe like Alex Callinicos. What would have happened? My guess is that the SWP would very possibly become as large a group as the British SWP, experiencing both influence and the hostility directed toward it from independents who resent its bullheaded style of “intervention” in the mass movement.

In reality, there is a spectrum of possibilities for such “democratic centralist” groups that extends from the fairly normal like the British SWP to the lunatic fringe that includes the Spartacist League and the American SWP. At either end of the spectrum, you are faced with the reality that such groups are not the proper vehicles for organizing a massive assault on the capitalist system.

To focus on the American SWP’s transformation into a cult, you are missing the real problem. If you want to understand why the conditions for such a transformation existed long before 1971, there is no better place to go than the remarks that Morris Stein, James P. Cannon’s top lieutenant, made to the 1944 convention:

We are monopolists in the field of politics. We can’t stand any competition. We can tolerate no rivals. The working class, to make the revolution can do it only through one party and one program. This is the lesson of the Russian Revolution. That is the lesson of all history since the October Revolution. Isn’t that a fact? This is why we are out to destroy every single party in the field that makes any pretense of being a working-class revolutionary party. Ours is the only correct program that can lead to revolution. Everything else is deception, treachery. We are monopolists in politics and we operate like monopolists.

I should mention that I discovered this quote in Alan Wald’s excellent essay in the book “Trotskyism in the USA”. You can get a used copy on Amazon.com for only $332.74. It is worth every penny.

When you bring together a character like Jack Barnes, who obviously had mental problems all along as great as Gerry Healy or any other notable Trotskyist megalomaniac, and the kind of bullheaded bravado encapsulated in Stein’s remarks, you have a formula for disaster. In the case of the SWP, this disaster began almost immediately after the 1960s radicalization came to an end. But if someone else less crazy than Barnes had been in charge, like Barry Sheppard (well, maybe not Barry), then the SWP would have muddled through the 70s, 80s and 90s until the present day running its sectarian campaigns, selling newspapers, and “intervening” in the mass movement.

But, comrades, something much more is needed. And the sooner the better.