The SWP and Social Distancing: a Study in Abnormal Political Psychology

COUNTERPUNCH, APRIL 10, 2020

In the photo below, dated March 15, 2020, you will see a group of mostly senior citizens defying the call for social distancing. Who could they be? Rightwing Christian evangelists? Libertarians standing up for liberty?

Nope. Instead, you are looking at members of the Socialist Workers Party at a memorial meeting for one of their members who died last month. The Militant newspaper reported that more than sixty people were in attendance. That’s probably about half the membership, and 1,900 less than when I was a member back in the 1970s. What happened to all these people, including me? Most either drifted away or became victims of a purge in the early 1980s when they fought to preserve the party’s Trotskyist heritage. Over the past decade, the dropout rate accelerated mostly as a result of the party adopting increasingly peculiar positions. Of the remaining 100 or so, their activism mostly consists of going door to door like Jehovah’s Witnesses peddling the books and newspapers of what most would view as a cult.

Was there some sort of death-wish at work in this March 16^th memorial meeting? If you are a typical member, there might be some relief in such an outcome. Many have jobs at Walmart despite college degrees and professional past. That in itself does not earn them brownie points with the long-time cult leadership that lives in Manhattan high-rises even more pricey than my own. Under social pressure, members must send in “blood money” to sustain the SWP. Such donations come from the paltry bonuses they receive at Walmart and other low-paying venues. Maybe, in the back of their minds, an end-run on a ventilator would be welcomed as euthanasia.

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Lev Tahor: the Jewish Taliban

Several days ago my tiny village in the Catskills got mentioned in a NY Times article titled “Jewish ‘Cult’ Tied to Brooklyn and Mexico Is Accused of Kidnapping 2 Children”. It seems that the children and their mother were part of a bizarre Taliban-like Hasidic cult based in Guatemala called Lev Tahor, which means “pure heart”. In October, she fled from the cult and relocated to Woodridge, New York, a village that was always predominantly Jewish but for the past decade or so at least has morphed into a Satmar Hasidic shtetl.

After my mom went into a nursing home over a decade ago, I went upstate to work on getting her house into shape for the real estate market. While working on the house, I used to go next door to chat with my Satmar neighbor, who had bought his house from my neighbor Frank Draganchuk, a Ukrainian-American who loved hunting as well as the animals he would shoot. He left salt licks behind his house just to admire the deer that he would hunt during season but far from his house.

After my house went on the market, it was snapped up almost immediately by another Satmar family. Within days of the sale, another neighbor who lived across the street, a garage mechanic and good old boy like Frank, phoned me to complain about the house being sold to a Satmar. A half-Jew himself, he might be perceived as an anti-Semite nonetheless. But another neighbor who lived down the street was not only a full-blooded Jew but the former president of the village synagogue where I was bar mitzvahed. He hated the Satmars with a passion. A WWII veteran like my father, his idea of Judaism was eating kosher and going to synagogue on Saturdays, not having your entire life revolve around rituals.

The Times describes Lev Tahor as anti-Zionist. As a split from the Satmar sect, this is one belief that they retained. The Satmars are staunchly opposed to Zionism, so much so that the Grand Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum was denounced by Jewish officialdom for blaming the West Bank settlers as being responsible for the murders of three of their teens by colonizing Palestinian land. Refusing to accept the legitimacy of Israel based on their interpretation of Jewish teachings (a Jewish state can only come into existence upon the return of a Messiah), he stated that while “every heart bleeds for the teens, it is incumbent upon us to say that these parents are guilty”. The settlers “place the lives of the Jewish people at risk for the sake of Zionism”. The most extreme sub-sect of the Satmars is Neturei Karta that denounces Israel at pro-Palestinian rallies organized by the PSL.

Just two months after the mom and her children settled down into normal Satmar life in Woodridge, a Lev Tahor member named Aron Rosner, who is the brother of the group’s leader, came into the village, kidnapped the two kids, Yante Teller, 14, and her brother, Chaim Teller, 12. They were brought to Mexico where they would then be transported on the next plane back to Guatemala. The Interpol arrested the kidnappers in Mexico and are in the process of sending the children back to Woodridge.

The children’s mom was the daughter of Shlomo Helbrans, the cult’s founder. After his death, his son Nachman took over. He is regarded as more extreme than his father and was arrested with the other kidnappers in Mexico. As part of the astonishing history of this tiny sect of no more than 200 members, Shlomo drowned on July 7, 2017 while performing a ritual immersion in a Mexican river. If the idea of Hasidic Jews in Mexico or Guatemala seems strange to those of you reading this post, imagine how Guatemalan Indians regarded them.

After settling in San Juan la Laguna, about 90 miles from Guatemala City, a local indigenous council told them to leave or else they would be forcefully removed. The Indians had problems with them refusing to greet or have physical contact with the community. Actually, that’s the way most of Woodridge’s more secular-minded Jews felt about the Satmars.

Ironically, Shlomo Helbrans was born into an Israeli family that was as secular-minded as my own. It was only after he turned 13 that he became a zealot. As for me, when I turned 13, I cut all my ties to organized Judaism. Getting bar mitzvahed was like graduating high school. Once you were certified, why would you ever want to go back to places as alienating as a high school or a synagogue?

I first heard about Helbrans in 1994 when he was involved in a case similar to this one. He had been charged with helping a 13-year old boy run away from his mother while taking bar mitzvah lessons with him. Sentenced to two years in prison, he left for Israel two years after his release where he established his cult that Israelis call the “Jewish Taliban”. According to Wikipedia, its practices include lengthy prayer sessions, arranged marriages between teenagers, and black, head-to-toe coverings for females beginning at age three.

Despite its minuscule size, the group has been widely covered in the media. Perhaps there is more than the customary interest in a Jewish group that forces its female members to wear burqas.

Foreign Policy ran a story in the January/February 2016 issue titled “A Tale of the Pure at Heart” that is worth reading. But for the most revealing look inside this controversial cult, I recommend this Global News documentary:

Finally, I can say that the readiness of such people to live within a cult is no great mystery. Judaism, like all “sky religions”, tends to create a rich subsoil for formations based on a strict obedience to doctrine and blind worship of the leading group. While Trotskyism was not a “sky religion”, it certainly knew how to keep people in line, including me over an 11 year period. Like the mother of the two kidnapped children, I bailed. Fortunately for me, nobody tried to kidnap me and force me to go door to door selling books written by Jack Barnes. They probably understood that I had gone over to Satan, thank god.

Was Joseph Hansen a GPU agent? A reply to WSWS.org

Joseph Hansen

Last month on Leftist trainspotters, someone referred to a 4-part series of articles that appeared on WSWS.org making the case that Sylvia Callen, James P. Cannon’s secretary, and Joe Hansen, one of the long-time leaders of the SWP and Trotsky’s bodyguard in Coyoacan, were GPU agents. I wrote a brief rejoinder but did not bother to read the articles. More recently, a troll showed up on my blog to use my article on UNZ Review to bring up the same charges. He thought I had a lot of nerve “policing” Norman Finkelstein’s affiliation with the neo-Nazi website when I was a veteran of a group that was filled with agent provocateurs and finks. When I asked him to substantiate this accusation, he too brought up the WSWS.org articles.

After giving it some thought, I decided to have a look at the articles. Although many veterans of the left understand that the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is a toxic cult, many less knowledgeable—including Chris Hedges—give it respect that it does not deserve.

This is not the first time I have examined these charges since I was in the SWP in the mid-70s when they were first raised. Before getting into the particulars, a bit of background is necessary, particularly for people like Hedges unfamiliar with the internecine squabbles of the Trotskyist movement.

In the 1950s, the Fourth International was divided into two factions. The International Committee (IC) included the SWP (prevented from formal membership by reactionary laws aimed mostly at the CPUSA) and Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labor League in England. The International Secretariat (IS) was led by a man named Michel Pablo who believed that the Cold War would force the CP’s to move in a revolutionary direction.

Essentially, the Cuban revolution laid the groundwork for reunifying most parties in the IC and the IS even though Healy remained adamantly opposed to the “petty bourgeois” adaption to Fidel Castro who they considered a nationalist defending capitalist property relations. After joining the SWP in 1967, I remember members of the Worker’s League, Healy’s satellite in the USA, showing up at Militant Labor Forums in New York to denounce the “Pabloite revisionists” during the Q&A. They looked rather like Diane Arbus photos.

Before delving into the articles, I should say a few words about Hansen. While generally considering my time in the SWP as mistake, I count Hansen as a major political influence alongside Peter Camejo. He was a master theoretician and polemicist whose critique of Guevarism was a major contribution to Marxism. In the mid-70s, just around the time Healy began explaining Hansen’s alleged Pabloite revisionism as a function of his secret ties to the Soviet Union, Hansen began his defense of mass action against guerrilla foquismo strategy, including a devastating summary of how Che’s failure to understand Stalinism led to his betrayal by the CP of Bolivia. If proof that Hansen was a GPU agent rested in his defending Cuba uncritically, then he should have been found not guilty.

Meanwhile, the Workers League was going through its own turmoil about secret agents at this time. Party leader Tim Wohlforth was married to a comrade named Nancy Field whose uncle was in the OSS, a precursor to the CIA, something that had never been revealed to their comrades. This led to the two of them being grilled by Healy in intimidating circumstances of the sort endured by Soviet dissidents and members of Larouche’s cult. As it happens, a radical being the relative of an CIA officer or any other high-ranking government official was typical of what was going on the 60s. For example, Robert McNamara’s son was an antiwar activist as were many other children of officials in both the Johnson and Nixon administrations as detailed in Tom Wells’s “The War Within”.

To some extent, searching for spies was to be expected in the Trotskyist movement since Stalin had every intention of destroying what he saw rightfully as his mortal enemy. Trotsky’s assassination was just one example of this campaign that forced his followers to fend off Stalinists at the same time they were dealing with FBI harassment and infiltration.

As for the FBI, the Socialist Equality Party claims that the leadership that evolved in the early 60s around Jack Barnes is made up of FBI agents because they all attended Carleton College in Minnesota. An obvious Healyite plant in the SWP, the lawyer Alan Gelfand was expelled as a provocateur in the mid-90s. Gelfand then sued the SWP for damages on the basis that his right to political expression had been denied. So, as you can see, this stuff about agents and spies has a long and tortured history on the fringes of the Trotskyist movement. However, it is odd that WSWS.org would bother in a new assault on the SWP since for all practical purposes it is a moribund sect that is not an obstacle to the growth of the SEP. The real obstacle to their becoming number one on the far left is their own crazy sectarian politics. As Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us”.

The bulk of the WSWS.org articles, which are written by Eric London, are focused on Cannon’s secretary who was known to the party as Sylvia Caldwell. After Max Shachtman and Albert Glotzer, two former leaders of the SWP who had left to form the Workers Party, heard rumors that Callen was a CP agent, they dropped in on Cannon in 1947 to urge him to conduct an investigation. One did take place that year, clearing her of all charges. One suspects that it was Cannon’s insistence that she was innocent that made the difference. Of course, this would implicate Cannon himself as an agent, a bridge too far even for conspiracy-minded sectarians. As soon as the investigation was completed, Callen resigned from the SWP and abandoned left politics altogether, either Stalinist or Trotskyist.

In 1950, ex-Communist and now McCarthyite tool Louis Budenz wrote a book titled “Men Without Faces” that was typical of the time. Like Whittaker Chambers, Budenz wrote about the CP as if it were indistinguishable from the GPU. This fed the paranoia of the witch hunt that made victimization of CP’ers so easy. Since Budenz identified Callen as a CP asset in the book, the SWP had no other recourse but to follow up and effectively re-open the investigation of 1947 even though she was no longer in the party. Cannon sent Farrell Dobbs out to speak to Callen who insisted that she was not guilty. This was enough for Cannon who wrote an article clearing her of Budenz’s charges.

The SWP continued to insist on Caldwell’s innocence even though she was named as a member of Jack Soble’s spy ring in a 1960 NY Times article. However, the Times refers to her as Sylvia Callen. That leaves open the question whether Cannon, Dobbs et al made the connection to Caldwell, Cannon’s secretary. The other curiosity is that despite being indicted, Callen never spent a day in jail. Considering the political climate 58 years ago, that is something of a mystery.

The first indication that the SWP might consider the possibility that Caldwell was a Stalinist agent occurred in 1976 when Healy’s accusations were roiling the left. In an article that appeared in Intercontinental Press defending Hansen by Betty Hamilton and Pierre Lambert, leaders of another Fourth International franchise,  the authors accepted the possibility that she might have been an agent and thought it appropriate for a new investigation to proceed. Looking back at this period, I doubt that the SWP would have found much use in establishing her guilt since Healy’s accusations only had the effect of deepening the isolation of his cult-sect. They hoped that he would hang himself on his own petard.

Sylvia Callen: interrogated by David North’s deputies

In 1976, the Workers League tracked down Callen to conduct their own investigation. At the time she was probably in her late 70s and appeared to have cognitive issues as this excerpt from the interview outside her trailer home would indicate:

Question: Do you have a memory block which begins after all these events supposedly took place?

Franklin: I don’t know. I wish you wouldn’t try to make me remember because I’ll have a breakdown. I can’t remember. It’s been many years, and I’ve put it out of my mind.

Question: Is it possible that you were in the Communist Party and simply have forgotten all about it?

Franklin: I don’t know. I don’t know. It could be one way. It could be the other. I can’t believe that person was me. I can’t believe that I worked in that office. That I was his secretary. I can’t believe anything.

In the view of the SEP, the SWP never held a new investigation of Caldwell because evidence about her GPU/CP connections would point in Joe Hansen’s direction. In the view of this batty sect-cult, it might have brought to light the letter that Hansen’s close friend Vaughn T. “Irish” O’Brien wrote in 1976:

In this letter, dated June 8, 1976, O’Brien recalled an encounter in the late 1940s or early 1950s—the general time frame of the control commission and the publication of Budenz’s books—with Pearl Kluger, a former member of A.J. Muste’s American Workers Party who knew Budenz personally. O’Brien wrote, “I had not seen Pearl for a considerable period of time, but she immediately said, ‘Budenz says your friend Joe Hansen worked with the GPU.’”

Wow, that’s the smoking gun, isn’t it? If Budenz said it, it must be true. For those curious about Budenz, you can find a bunch of his articles archived at the neo-Nazi UNZ Review—that should give you an idea of their provenance. As it happens, you can find O’Brien’s letter on Google books. It is exactly the opposite of what Eric London purports. O’Brien wrote the letter in order to assure Hansen that the charges against him were preposterous.

Indeed, immediately after the sentence above quoting Pearl about Joe working with the GPU, O’Brien follows up with: “I replied, with great earnestness, that while I was aware of circumstances which might lead Budenz to make such a charge, it was not true.” In fact, despite Pearl’s reference to Budenz charge, Hansen is not mentioned once in his writings. Imagine that. With such a potentially juicy expose about Trotsky’s bodyguard being in cahoots with the Kremlin, why wouldn’t Budenz have mentioned it somewhere in his books or articles? Probably because it wasn’t true and didn’t want to risk being sued for libel.

O’Brien clarifies Hansen’s contact with the GPU in 1938 that features so prominently in Healy’s demagogic attacks. What Healy leaves out is that Hansen made this contact with the full knowledge of Trotsky. The only other party members who knew what was really going on were Cannon and Shachtman, the two top leaders of the SWP. All of them were privy to a money-raising scam that Hansen was going to carry out. He would tell the GPU that he had become disillusioned with the movement and would be willing to sell the only manuscript of Trotsky’s biography of Stalin for $25,000 so that he could buy himself a “nice little ranch” in Utah and retire from politics. As it happened, the GPU was not interested in the manuscript but was much more interested in the layout of Trotsky’s house in Coyoacan for obvious reasons.

Does this story sound far-fetched? To me it does but if you are going to cite O’Brien, you need to do it in a way that follows elementary journalistic standards. He was not endorsing Budenz, or at least what he was purported to have said. Just the opposite. As for journalistic standards, they went by the wayside on the very day WSWS.org was launched.

 

 

Charles Manson and the 1960s

Just by coincidence, the 83-year old Charles Manson died in Mercy Hospital in Bakersfield just 12 days after American Horror Story aired a chillingly accurate recreation of the infamous Helter Skelter murders in 1969 that landed him and all but one of his henchmen in prison for the rest of their lives. Steve Grogan was the only member of his cult to ever be paroled. Even as the judge in his trial stated that he “was too stupid and too hopped on drugs to decide anything on his own”, he spent 14 years in prison. Another cult member, one “Squeaky” Fromme was not involved in the Helter Skelter killings but gained infamy for aiming a gun at President Gerald Ford in 1979. At her trial, where she refused to cooperate in her defense, she reacted to the life sentence by saying, “”I stood up and waved a gun for a reason. I was so relieved not to have to shoot it, but, in truth, I came to get life. Not just my life but clean air, healthy water, and respect for creatures and creation.”

Clearly, these people were borderline psychotic or even fully fledged.

This, the seventh season of American Horror Story, is titled Cult and is deeply engaged with American politics today even if it avoids making social commentary. The primary purpose of the series that concluded last week is to use the right/left divide in the USA today as satirical fodder after the fashion of Mike Judge or Trey Parker but with a Grand Guignol sensibility.

The primary character is a Richard Spencer type named Kai who shows up in a small town just before the 2016 election to build support for Donald Trump. Before long he finds himself in a clash with a married lesbian couple who are divided over who to support. One is committed to Hilary Clinton and the other to Jill Stein.

Before long, Kai has built up a cult of locals, including the Jill Stein supporter who has abandoned her Green Party politics as easily as a snake sheds its skin. The cult is on a secret mission to plunge the town, the state, and eventually the entire nation into fascism through a series of false flag incidents. One he dubs “The Night of a Thousand Tates” in homage to Charles Manson. He will send out his cult members to knife a thousand pregnant women, just as Roman Polanski’s wife, the very pregnant actress Sharon Tate, was killed in 1969. Manson intended his murder to spark a race war by having his acolytes scrawling the word “pigs” on Polanski’s house, a word associated with Black militancy. In Cult, it is not made crystal clear why killing pregnant women will spark a war between the Christian right and Hilary Clinton voters but by episode 10, Kai is a raving lunatic.

To prepare his followers for “The Night of a Thousand Tates”, Kai recounts the Helter Skelter murders that are reenacted quite graphically in episode 10 with the actor playing Kai also playing Manson (in the previous episode, he became Jim Jones). The purpose of the politics in Cult is simply to provide a peg upon which gruesome scenes can unfold with deadpan humor and it succeeds nicely. If you want to get your minds off the real horrors taking place in Puerto Rico or Syria, this FX series is just the thing.

I have vivid memories of the Charles Manson incident since some on the left endorsed his attack. In 1981, Lucinda Franks wrote a 6600-word article for the NY Times that made an amalgam between SDS, the antiwar movement, and Manson:

”All white babies are pigs,” one Weatherman shouted during the council, in which some 400 people crowded into a large hall hung with signs reading ”Piece (that is, guns) now.” Bernardine Dohrn, who later took control of the organization when it went underground, made a speech accusing the left of being scared ”honkies” for not burning down Chicago when Hampton was killed, and urging her audience to take up arms and be ”a fighting force alongside the blacks.” The Weathermen were to become as savage as Charles Manson, who massacred Sharon Tate and her friends in her Beverly Hills home. Dohrn said: ”Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach. Wild!”

While everybody understood that the Weathermen had lost their minds by this point, there were others who were nearly as bad, even though they were considered to be reasonable. The New Times, a magazine that was the Salon.com of its day, had a cover photo of a handcuffed Manson with the heading, “The Media Assassination of Charlie Manson: Last Interview from Jail”.

You have to keep in mind that Manson had adopted the guise of a hippie guru after being released from prison in 1967. He headed straight for Berkeley where a fellow ex-con had helped him find an apartment. He supported himself at first by begging on the street, which was very common in those days, and then went on to leech off of various wealthy people, including Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Manson and his 12 female cult members moved into Wilson’s mansion where the two were served by them as if sultans in a harem. Manson, who had dreams of becoming a musician and songwriter, impressed Wilson so much so that he actually recorded a song Manson had written titled “Never Learn to Love” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRGI5Exr3ZQ).

By 1969, the bloom had faded from the hippie rose. First, there was Manson’s cult and then there was the free Altamont rock concert in 1970 when Hells Angels hired as security guards for a rock concert knifed a black man to death during a Rolling Stones performance. Billed as Woodstock West, it was ample proof that the “groovy” vibe of the earlier concert had died. The Angels had become respectable after Ken Kesey, the author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, had invited them to one of his acid-dropping sessions.

In keeping with the nihilistic anthem “Sympathy for the Devil” that the Stones began to perform, a confrontation began that resulted in the murder of Meredith Hunter, an 18-year old African-American man who was totally stoned and bent on mounting the stage. After he was punched out by a Hells Angel, he drew a 22 caliber pistol from within his jacket and headed toward the stage again. At that point, the Angel drew a knife and stabbed him to death. For young “peace and love” hippie types, this incident symbolized the end of an era and meshed perfectly with the sense of futility over the continuing war in Vietnam. The Maysles brothers made a documentary about the concert titled “Gimme Shelter” that can be viewed here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEw_FuglGVU

I watched all this going on from a distance feeling rather superior to the hippie implosion. I was around people who had never taken drugs and who went about their mission of overthrowing the capitalist system with a single-mindedness that was the polar opposite of the hippie dream of achieving peace and love by “dropping out”.

I had no idea at the time that I too belonged to a cult but one that was far less malevolent than Manson’s or Kai’s. What they all had in common was a subordination of the individual to the Divine Master that prevented independent thinking. By the end of the seventies, I had become a disillusioned ex-cult member but not one who had given up on the stated purpose of the cult, namely to create a society based on human need rather than private profit. I had come to the conclusion after a very painful experience that socialist revolutions are carried out collectively but Marxist thought is a deeply individual endeavor. Unless you think for yourself, you cannot make a contribution to Marxism. The conditions that created the deep alienation and criminality of Helter Skelter and the Altamont concert are spawned by a system that has long outlived its usefulness. It is no accident that the fascist-like movements that are making headway around the world, including the USA, put a premium on following a leader blindly. This is essentially the message of American Horror Story: Cult that lies beneath its Grand Guignol surface.

 

Gary Cohen: the death of an SWP diehard

After I transferred to the Boston branch in 1970 to shore up the SWP majority faction, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Howard St. in Cambridge, about a fifteen-minute walk from Harvard Square. My first roommate was a closeted gay member who transferred out of Boston to the Portland branch. From time to time, I Google his name to see what has become of him. Like most people I knew from the Trotskyist movement in the early 70s, he seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth.

After he left town, the spare bedroom was taken over by a comrade named Gary Cohen who has just died. Like my mom who used to read the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle long after she had moved to upstate NY with my dad, I read the Militant newspaper mostly to see who has passed on (as well as to see the latest bizarro article).

Like most of the memorial articles that appear in the Militant, instead of getting a sense of the person, you only get the cookie-cutter version of how they functioned as a “Bolshevik”. Unlike most SWP’ers, Gary never “made the turn toward industry”. I myself tried one morning to make the turn as a spot welder (the longest 3 hours of my life) and decided to quit the job after the lunch whistle blew.

The article passed judgment on Gary:

“Gary was a lifer, who joined the party as a young man and remained committed to the SWP and the fight for a better world,” said [Paul] Mailhot. “He didn’t participate in the party’s turn to industry in the late 1970s through the 1990s, when all members of the party were getting jobs in union mines, mills, factories and railroads. He wasn’t in the center of the party’s work then. Later, in 2001, he dropped out of the party and became a supporter.”

Talk about damning with faint praise.

In fact, Gary was a dentist when he moved in with me. The article does give him credit for how he spent his years before joining the sect: “Cohen became involved in protests and sit-ins against racist segregation in the 1950s. He joined the Air Force and was stationed in Japan in the early 1960s, where his experiences deepened his opposition to imperialist militarism and war.”

Joining the Trotskyist movement in 1960 and dropping out in 2001,  his tenure in the SWP was a long slog: forty-one years. A real diehard. And after dropping out, Gary became a “sympathizer” for another 16 years, a status roughly equivalent to being in Dante’s limbo. Someone like myself would be seen as dwelling in Hades, if not in the Ninth Circle. (The truth is that I rule the realm of ex-SWP’ers like Lucifer.)

A week or so ago, an ex-member told me that the sect is down to 88 voting members that rely on the support of about 250 sympathizers who are called upon to scan books for the Pathfinder project, contribute money, and take on “Jimmy Higgins” tasks. I would guess that the average age of these people is about 65. As their numbers dwindle, the SWP will someday give up the ghost just like Daniel De Leon’s SLP. What keeps it going for the time being is the slavish devotion of the voting members to cult leader Jack Barnes who has not written a single article for the party press in at least a decade.

When I got up to Boston, Gary and Linda Sheppard (now known as Linda Thompson) were the two most committed supporters of the SWP majority that was trying to purge the branch of Larry Trainor’s tendency that was uneasy with the orientation to the student and antiwar movement. Trainor, like Farrell Dobbs, was always expecting the 1970s to turn into the 1930s. As such, it was necessary for SWP members to be “implanted” in mines, mills, factories, and railroads as Mailhot indicated.

By 1978, the year the turn began, Cohen must have been close to fifty and in the third decade of both a dentistry career and SWP membership. He used to work on the teeth of SWP members for free, including me, in an office near Cambridge’s Central Square. I don’t think he liked dentistry very much but it certainly made for a fairly lucrative career that was reflected in the tens of thousands of dollars he contributed as a member and then as a sympathizer.

Gary probably understood better than the people who were pressuring him to “go into industry” that he could not make the turn. In a normal left party, this would have not been expected from someone who had been a member for over 25 years but this was a cult that was always testing members’ True Faith.

The obit does not give you much sense of Gary’s personality except that he had “a wicked sense of humor”. Well, not exactly. Gary was a compulsive punner (in the clinical psychology sense) who would inevitably take something you said in conversation and turn it into a pun. Afterwards, he’d laugh at his joke—a bit hysterically.

Probably the only thing that anchored this fragile personality was his party duties that the article does not mention. Gary was the Militant Labor Forum director in Boston for many years and very good at it. These were weekly public meetings at headquarters where a party representative would speak alongside someone from the mass movement. In the early 70s, the most common topics for these meetings were the antiwar movement, the woman’s movement that was just taking off, Black nationalism, etc.

Gary also had a weekly radio program on some university radio station that followed the same format. He was known to the listening public as Gary Kane and very good at what he did.

Gary and Linda Sheppard were the scourges of Larry Trainor’s followers. Gary took every opportunity at branch meetings to denounce “workerism”. The irony is that within 5 years, the SWP had adopted Trainor’s perspective—or more accurately, taken that perspective to the extreme. I am quite sure that if Larry had lived to see the party he built dwindle down to less than 90 members because of driving people like Gary Cohen out of the movement, he would curse Jack Barnes the same way he did in the early 70s.

As the SWP grew weirder and weirder, it must have had an effect on Gary psychologically. I heard through the grapevine that he had a nervous breakdown in the 1980s but responded well to electroconvulsive therapy (ie., shock treatments), so much so that he ditched the dentistry career and became an ECT technician.

Looking back at the days I spent in the SWP, I can see how most of us—including me—were psychological misfits. What saved me from becoming a 57-year combined member and sympathizer of the SWP was my highly developed passive-aggressive tendencies. The first inkling I got that someone like Jack Barnes was trying to screw me, that’s when I bared my fangs.

The crowning irony is that the memorial meeting for Gary was held in Boston, where the SWP folded shop two years ago. You can read my obit for the Boston branch here.

The death agony of the Socialist Workers Party

Jack Barnes

As most of my regular readers know, I was in the SWP from 1967 to 1978. Three years after leaving, I came into contact with Peter Camejo, a former leader who had broken with the party. His article “Against Sectarianism” had a profound impact on my thinking and I have tried to incorporate its lessons in nearly everything I write about the problem of party-building.

In 1991 I went to work for Columbia University and soon began writing about the phenomenon of Marxist sectarianism on various mailing lists hosted by the Spoons Collective and later on for Marxmail that was launched in 1998. From 1991 to the early 2000s, there was a steady decline in the SWP’s influence, so much so that I became persuaded that discussing it any longer on Marxmail was a waste of bandwidth. Some ex-members on Marxmail, who remained obsessed with the group as bitter adversaries or devoted sympathizers, ignored my advice to put it behind them and periodically started some thread about a group whose numbers and influence had dwindled to the vanishing point.

I had no other recourse except to create a mailing list on Yahoo in 2005 devoted to discussing the SWP. The whole purpose of creating the list was to shunt conversation away from Marxmail where 90 percent of the subscribers had little interest in it one way or the other, including myself at that point. The Yahoo list has twice as many subscribers as there are SWP members although I have no plans to make them go out and sell a book door-to-door based on my thoughts.

In the recent past, there have been such shocking developments with this sect-cult of probably around a hundred members with an average age of 55 or so that I have decided to file this report. I don’t think there is much point in trying to connect its paroxysms with the tasks facing the left today except maybe to indicate that “Leninism” can produce some remarkable pathologies.

On December 16, 2016, the equally nutty and irrelevant Spartacist League wrote a typical scandal item concerning the SWP’s newspaper that I almost regarded as a spoof. The Militant had sent out a notice to its subscribers to throw away its November 28 issue because it had the wrong line on the Donald Trump presidency.

I don’t remember any of Craine’s previous articles that anticipated the discarded November 28th item but I would guess that it was boilerplate analysis of the sort that had been run in the paper for a year or so, referring to itself as the true working class alternative to Sanders, Clinton and Trump. While any radical outside of the DSA orbit would likely see the need for a clean break with the Democrats, it was hard to take the SWP campaign seriously. But what would persuade Jack Barnes to authorize a letter to the Militant subscribers asking them to throw away the November 28 issue? Didn’t it enter his mind that this makes the group look rather batty? Apparently not.

This kind of instability has marked the party’s public record on a fairly consistent basis for the past decade or so and accelerated in the past few months. Poor Naomi Craine was once again taken to task in the issue dated February 13, 2017. In this instance, it was not about Trump but about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Recognition of Israel key for toilers in Mideast

 The article “Capitalist Rulers in Mideast Shift Allies While Toilers Face Catastrophe” in the Jan. 16 issue of the Militant concludes with a quote, with no comment, from former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki saying, “I tell you of the threat that surpasses terrorism which is the Zionist enemy. And we should all stand on one front against this threat.”

Any new reader would have to assume that Militant editors agree with the reactionary former Iraqi prime minister on “the Zionist enemy.”

Regular readers must have been surprised, since the quote is the opposite of the political line of previous Militant articles, the Socialist Workers Party’s program and its political course.

Al-Maliki’s statement fits with the view of the entire middle-class left in the United States, across Europe, and worldwide. Not to mention the Iraqi, Iranian, and many other bourgeois regimes across North Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia — all of whom demagogically posture as defenders of the dispossessed Palestinian people to bolster their own class rule. All of whom oppress and exploit the workers and farmers in those countries.

That is the opposite of the internationalist working-class course of the Socialist Workers Party. As the global capitalist crisis intensifies, the resurgence of Jew-hatred and attacks on Jews and synagogues is a reminder that the Holocaust and what led to it are not matters of “history.” They are growing realities of the brutal imperialist world order today.

Revolutionaries must press for recognition of the state of Israel, and for the right of Jews who wish to go there for refuge to do so. That’s also a political precondition to rebuilding a movement capable of advancing a successful fight for a Palestinian state, and for a contiguous, viable homeland for the Palestinian people.

Of all the gyrations found in The Militant, none is more bizarre and more reactionary than the open support for Israel. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to describe the party as Zionist. Not that it would excuse having such positions, one might expect the sect to provide some sort of analysis on how it came to reverse previously held positions. When I joined in 1967 just after the Six Day war, I was eager to break with the Zionism of my mother and father if for no other reason than Israel supporting the Vietnam war, a litmus test for me. In numerous books and articles by Peter Buch and Jon Rothschild, the SWP advocated the same position that it now describes as that of “the entire middle-class left”.

In keeping with the instability of the SWP, it continues selling books through Pathfinder Press that it would condemn as “Jew-hatred”. This includes Maxime Rodinson’s “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?” that it describes as examining “the historical roots of the Zionist movement and how the State of Israel was formed as a colonial-settler state dispossessing the Palestinian people.” Or Gus Horowitz’s “Israel and the Arab Revolution” that consists of resolutions adopted by the SWP from 1970-1971, including one by Horowitz that states:

Our program for the Palestinian revolution and the Arab revolution as a whole includes support of full civil, cultural and religious rights for all nationalities in the Mideast, including the Israeli Jews. But, while we support the right of the Israeli Jews to pursue their national culture within the frame-work of a democratic Palestine, we are opposed to the Israeli state.

How can you take a group seriously that still sells literature that its newspaper would consider guilty of anti-Semitism? The answer is that you can’t. Compare what Horowitz wrote in 1971 with a report from the SWP convention held between January 14-16, 2017:

Revolutionaries must push for recognition of the right of Israel to exist, Clark said, including the right of return for Jews looking for refuge from persecution, as well as for recognition of a state for the dispossessed Palestinian people. This is the only way to open the space for working people who are Arab and Jewish to build solidarity and fight together against capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression throughout the region.

You must ask yourself what sort of person would join a group that defends the “right of return” for Israel during a dramatic expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Or whose main activity consists of members going door-to-door peddling a book titled “Are They Rich Because They’re Smart?” that consists of transcriptions of speeches given by cult leader Jack Barnes between 1993 and 2009. This is a leader who humiliates Naomi Craine for writing articles that deviate 3 degrees from his own potted notion of the party line but who hasn’t written an article for the Militant in over 20 years or so.

The interesting question is whether Jack Barnes was nuts back in 1967 when I joined or became nuts in the same way that Gerry Healy or any number of other Trotskyist geniuses became crazy. When you see yourself as the avatar of Lenin or Trotsky destined to lead the world proletarian revolution, there are enormous gravitational forces that propel you in a megalomaniac direction.

I have heard an uncorroborated report from a former member that a national leader of the party was touring the country, talking to “Organized Supporters” in cities where they don’t have branches about the dire straits they find themselves in – shrinking membership, circulation of The Militant down, etc.

With the cash they have on hand from the multimillion dollar sale of the West Street headquarters, they should sputter along for some time. Then again, so did the Socialist Labor Party that closed its national office on September 1, 2008 after more than a century. The more likely cutoff date for the SWP will be when the last member dies of some geriatric illness like cancer or heart disease. That will happen sooner or later, just like the sun sets in the evening.

The Cassiopaea Experiment: the grotesque cult in Assad’s corner

Cult figure Laura Knight-Jadczyk, co-editor of Signs of the Time with Eva Bartlett

When I discovered last week that David Icke was simultaneously a high-profile propagandist for Bashar al-Assad’s genocidal-like war on his own countrymen and an author who writes that a group of shapeshifting reptilian humanoids are conspiring to destroy the planet Earth, my first reaction was stunned disbelief. When I discovered a couple of days ago that a cult with notions just as bizarre as Icke’s was also carrying Assad’s water, it dawned on me that there was a pattern. If you understand the war in Syria as a conspiracy by the West to remove a popular and progressive leader, you would be inclined to see the world in conspiratorial terms generally and be capable of asserting that alien abductions are real.

As I have pointed out in the past, some of the key Assadist outlets such as Global Research are also committed to 9/11 Truthism. But when I ran into the people behind the Sign of the Times website that like David Icke was all too happy to give Eva Bartlett a platform, it finally became clear to me that the Assadist subculture had bred some truly grotesque creatures out of the conspiracist underground that would repel any sensible person on the left. Not only have dozens of her articles appeared on Signs of the Time; she is also listed as an editor.

I was vaguely aware of sott.net since any number of the imbeciles I have debated over the past 5 years have referred to it as a reliable source of information on the war in Syria. Like Global Research, 21^st Century Wire, Canary and Mint News, it is primarily an aggregator of news articles sympathetic to Assad, Iran and the Kremlin.

When I noticed a link to it earlier in the week, I decided to check out its provenance—wondering if it was based in Russia like many of these outlets. In small print at the bottom of the home page you find this: “E-mails sent to Sott.net become the property of Quantum Future Group, Inc (QFG) and may be published without notice.”

Okay, putting on my tinfoil investigative reporting cap, I decided to check out the QFG. They describe themselves innocently enough:

During the the [sic] past hundred years or so, every important idea for social change has been incubated in the nonprofit sector. The struggles for civil rights, for women’s rights, for environmental health, for AIDS treatment, for disabled access, for sustainability, for peace, for family support, for jobs and economic development — these are all ideas that were nurtured and launched through nonprofit organizations that have changed the world. The ideas of the founders and members of Quantum Future Group go to the core of these issues, seeking scientific socio-cultural solutions to the most fundamental problems of humanity.

Nothing wrong with that, I guess.

Looking further as I always do in these instances, I checked out the board of directors. These were the three primary players: Arkadiusz Jadczyk, a physicist with a PhD from a Polish university, his wife Laura Knight-Jadczyk, who attended a community college but lacked a degree, and Joe Quinn, who had an MBA and worked in management before becoming a full-time volunteer for the Quantum Future Group.

Again, no warning signs.

It was only when I went to their Reports page that the plot began to thicken. Ms. Knight-Jadczyk was the author of a forthcoming book titled “Josephus, Pilate and Paul: It’s Just a Matter of Time” that struck me as a bit odd. Meanwhile, her husband had a book titled “Political Ponerology” that struck me as even odder since ponerology is a rather obscure term meaning the study of evil. A quick search on Google revealed that the book had been published by Red Pill Press, which is as you might expect a subsidiary of QFG.

When I went to the Red Pill Press website, that’s when the shit began to hit the fan. Among the books on sale there besides “Political Ponerology” was one called “Manufactured Terror” that was co-authored by the aforementioned Joe Quinn and someone named Niall Bradley and that was described as “banned from Amazon.com”. The book purports to be an investigation of “false flag” incidents, including Sandy Hook where a crazed 20-year old gunman named Adam Lanza killed 20 grade school students and 6 adults working at the school. On Joe Quinn’s blog, he argues that “an elite cabal has existed in the USA for several decades and has been involved in assassinations” and that “it is entirely rational to conclude, on the balance of this collective evidence, that Adam Lanza was not yet another ‘lone gunman’”.

So naturally Eva Bartlett, whose journalism consists mostly of denying that any children were killed in East Aleppo and other outrageous claims, would have an affinity with the likes of Joe Quinn.

There’s also a book for sale there written by fellow QFG board member Laura Knight-Jadczyk titled “The Secret History of the World” that has this blurb:

Conspiracies have existed since the time of Cain and Abel. Facts of history have been altered to support the illusion. The question today is whether a sufficient number of people will see through the deceptions, thus creating a counter-force for positive change – the gold of humanity – during the upcoming times of Macro-Cosmic Quantum Shift. Laura argues convincingly, based on the revelations of the deepest of esoteric secrets, that the present is a time of potential transition, an extraordinary opportunity for individual and collective renewal: a quantum shift of awareness and perception which could see the birth of true creativity in the fields of science, art and spirituality.

What the fuck was a Macro-Cosmic Quantum Shift? Succumbing to my insatiable curiosity about lunatics such as David Icke and the QFG people, I googled “Macro-Cosmic Quantum Shift” and discovered a link to the Cassiopaea Experiment, the bizarre cult that gave birth to the Quantum Future Group that gave spawned Signs of the Time. I now felt like Ripley in “Aliens” after discovering the primal egg-producing creature that had to be destroyed.

Primarily a project of community college drop-out Ms. Knight-Jadczyk, it is described as follows:

Many years of research, experience, and constructive curiosity led to Laura’s experiment in Superluminal Communication that eventually, after two years of experimentation and fine tuning, which included contacts with “dead dudes” (alleged discarnate entities) and deceptive sources posing as higher sources of knowledge, resulted in the Cassiopaean Transmissions. All these years the process has gone through refinement and adjusting all “instruments” for higher accuracy and facilitation of better communication. These communications ARE different from most other channeled information.

Between David Icke’s belief that he was a latter day Jesus Christ assigned the task to save the world and her Superluminal (faster than light) Communication with “dead dudes”, clearly we are in the realm described by Leon Trotsky in “What is National Socialism”: “Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms.”

Like David Icke, Ms. Knight-Jadczyk believes in Extraterrestrials but probably more benign than his reptilian interlopers. In an article titled “The Case for the UFO”, she finds thunderstorms a rather convincing demonstration of visitors from another planet:

In our study of storms we have been driven inexorably to admit that some storms have an artificial aspect, a sort of organic appearance, an air of being manufactured for a purpose and to be carrying out that purpose. We therefore postulate some percentage of artificiality, or intelligence, among that small percentage of storms which suddenly appear in otherwise undisturbed skies, proceed with a purposeful manner, as though concealing something, and discharge peculiar materials. They seem too concentrated, perhaps too directive, to be entirely meteorological in their origins.

I believe that space structures of five to twenty miles diameter are sufficiently large to produce such storms, and there may be elements of purposefulness in so doing, if only for camouflage or concealment.

Evidently, some people find the Jadczyk’s much more impressive than I do, so much so that a cult formed around them. Describing herself as an ex-cult member, Colleen Johnson  spilled the goods on the “Malevolent Alien Abduction Research Web Site” of all places. I have no idea whether Johnson believes in alien abductions but her article is mostly about the shady operations of the QFG, the Cassiopaea Experiment and anything else connected to these people.

Former members that wish to remain anonymous, also claim they were scammed out of large sums of money when the Jadczyk’s suddenly uprooted the Perseus Foundation from New Port Richey, Florida and moved it to France leaving many a bewildered cult member feeling emotionally raped by their experience and financially taken advantage of.

The Jadczyk’s raised well over $100,000.00 to $150,000.00 from a bogus raffle to sell their home (AKA the Perseus Foundation) via PayPal then split with the money, leaving an unverified winner unknown to members but close to Laura. According to 2003 documents the home is still up for sale and a former devoted member lives there as caretaker showing the property. Laura is in legal trouble with fraud and embezzlement if she returns to the USA. Many  ex-members would sue her if they could get her back here.

You can get more of the lurid details from “starspray21” on his or her Newsvine website.

The Background – In 1994 a down and out new age spiritualist named Fred Irland along with a very disturbed woman trained in the science of hypno-therapy and thought manipulation began an experiment where they attempted to “channel” beings from a higher state of consciousness through a ouiji board. The pseudo-scientific séance experiment (or scam) was a “success” and the Cassiopaeans revealed themselves. Subsequently the woman, Ms. Laura Knight Jadczyk, made off with the idea and on her websites does not credit Mr. Irland at all for his part in helping to discover these profitable beings. The beings known as the Cassiopaeans are supposedly “herself in the future” (?) from the distant constellation Orion. Basically the Cassiopaeans are used to promote and validate a certain world view. This world view now forms the foundation of her cult. The world view she promotes claims that we are all under the domination of 4th dimensional evil “overlords of entropy” who feed off of our negative energy and keep the humans on this planet the way a scientist might keep lab rats or the way a farmer might keep livestock. After ditching Mr. Irland, she merged a severely edited version of these crazy Cassiopean ‘transmitions’ with a bastardized and twisted version of the teachings of a French philosopher named Gurdjieff. Then abra cadabra, a cult was born. The ideas of Gurdjieff seem on the face of it to lend credibility to Ms. Knight Jadczyk and her crazy money scheme. But when you look closely you see it for what it is – psychosis parlayed into a very profitable scam.

Don’t these people sound exactly like those that would bond ideologically with “journalist” Eva Bartlett, their fellow editor and scam artist?

 

Bringing out the dead in Kansas City

Yesterday the NY Times ran an article that reminded me of why the paper is so indispensable even if it is easy (and true) to dismiss it as the voice of the liberal wing of the ruling class. It was a long and thoroughly researched piece on how city employees clean up after the corpses of isolated individuals whose deaths remain unannounced except for the stench of their decomposing bodies:

They found him in the living room, crumpled up on the mottled carpet. The police did. Sniffing a fetid odor, a neighbor had called 911. The apartment was in north-central Queens, in an unassertive building on 79th Street in Jackson Heights.

The apartment belonged to a George Bell. He lived alone. Thus the presumption was that the corpse also belonged to George Bell. It was a plausible supposition, but it remained just that, for the puffy body on the floor was decomposed and unrecognizable. Clearly the man had not died on July 12, the Saturday last year when he was discovered, nor the day before nor the day before that. He had lain there for a while, nothing to announce his departure to the world, while the hyperkinetic city around him hurried on with its business.

Neighbors had last seen him six days earlier, a Sunday. On Thursday, there was a break in his routine. The car he always kept out front and moved from one side of the street to the other to obey parking rules sat on the wrong side. A ticket was wedged beneath the wiper. The woman next door called Mr. Bell. His phone rang and rang.

Then the smell of death and the police and the sobering reason that George Bell did not move his car.

Imagine the training in journalism school it took for the reporters to come up with the telling details about the men who came in to examine the dead man’s apartment and what they saw:

Mr. Plaza had been a data entry clerk before joining his macabre field in 1994; Mr. Rodriguez had been a waiter and found his interest piqued in 2002.

What qualified someone for the job? Ms. Rosenblatt, the head of the office, summed it up: “People willing to go into these disgusting apartments.”

The two men foraged through the unedited anarchy, 800 square feet, one bedroom. A stench thickened the air. Mr. Plaza dabbed his nostrils with a Vicks vapor stick. Mr. Rodriguez toughed it out. Vicks bothered his nose.

The only bed was the lumpy foldout couch in the living room. The bedroom and bathroom looked pillaged. The kitchen was splashed with trash and balled-up, decades-old lottery tickets that had failed to deliver. A soiled shopping list read: sea salt, garlic, carrots, broccoli (two packs), “TV Guide.”

The faucet didn’t work. The chipped stove had no knobs and could not have been used to cook in a long time.

Frankly, I find this reportage ten times more compelling than anything on the NY Times Fiction Best Sellers list especially since it reminds me of the grizzly encounter I had with such an incident when I was living in Kansas City in 1978 in my final days with the Socialist Workers Party cult.

I was living on the ground floor of an old house that had been converted into a multiple occupancy building at the time and working for the United Missouri Bank. At nights I was taking classes in lathe and milling machines at a vocational high school so I could acquire the necessary skills to “go into industry”. It was a last-ditch effort to stay in the party. The whole experience evoked hanging from the edge of a cliff while someone stomps on your fingers.

One afternoon I came home from work and was stunned to see a fire truck and police cars on the street in front of my building. A ladder was resting on the side just underneath an immense hole in the wall as if someone had used a wrecking ball to get into the apartment above mine.

As I got out of my car and began walking down the front walk, my super—an affable Chicano whose name I don’t recall—came up to give me the news. The man who lived upstairs and who weighed over 600 pounds had died of a heart attack. When the cops came, they found his body simply too massive to move through the apartment and down the stairs. So they called the fire department that had the necessary equipment to carve a hole out of the side of the building and use a cherry picker to hoist his corpse to the ground.

My poor super, just like the men profiled in the Times article, had to clean up after the dead man’s remains. He told me that he had only figured out that someone had died after a smell had wafted out from beneath the door. I guess I was so preoccupied with cult life that I managed to overlook it.

But once I was apprised of the man’s death, I could not get pass the smell, which was a mixture of the remains of the rotting flesh and the heavy-duty disinfectant that the super had used. At night I laid in bed pondering over my future in the SWP as the smell from upstairs played counterpoint to my brooding.

This was just the latest incident in a life marked by the macabre and the pathetic on one side and the comically absurd on the other. I tried to capture all this in the memoir I did with Harvey Pekar even as some idiots in the ISO tried to understand it terms of the typical revolutionary memoir. I was doing Pekar and they expected something that a sectarian would write filled with boring anecdotes about fighting the cops and making speeches to the masses, like Tariq Ali’s dreary “Street Fighting Man”.

For those interested in what it was like in Kansas City in the tail-end of a futile exercise in revolutionary politics, I invite you to read this excerpt from my memoir that I reproduce here under the provisions of Fair Use legislation.

Open Borders

In the latest Militant newspaper, the organ of the infinitesimally small and monumentally bizarre SWP, there’s a swipe at a position defended in last week’s edition:

The labor officialdom in the United States and the different capitalist countries in Europe have refused to carry out the fight for working-class unity over decades, instead joining with each of their bosses’ governments in advancing a nationalist and protectionist course. Workers everywhere have to chart a new road forward.

It’s different than a general call to “open the borders,” as an editorial in last week’s Militant put forward. That’s a utopian demand, and, if adopted under capitalist rule, would lead to increased competition among workers, unemployment, lower wages and social misery.

This is not the first time such a correction has been made. Usually it can be attributed to Jack Barnes reversing himself on previously held positions. This never happened when I was in the SWP in the 1960s and 70s and probably reflects the descent of this sect into ever more increasingly uncharted waters with an unstable cult figure at the helm.

As it turns out, this is not the only cult-sect that is opposed to open borders because it is “utopian”. The Spartacist League that SWP’ers used to laugh at for its weirdness issued a reply to a reader’s letter that sounds like it could be an editorial in the Militant at this point:

The call to “open the borders” and its variants are hopelessly utopian. The modern nation-state arose as a vehicle for the development of capitalism and will remain the basis for the organization of the capitalist economy until the world capitalist order is shattered through a series of workers revolutions. Policing its borders is vital to the very existence of the capitalist state power. Moreover, “open the borders” can have a reactionary content, from advancing imperialist economic penetration of dependent countries to obliterating the right to national self-determination.

This, of course, is an odd use of the term “utopian”, which in Marxist theory generally refers to beliefs that small-scale experiments in collective ownership can lead to socialism. It would be clearer if the two sects would use the word “unrealistic” instead of “utopian” to avoid confusion. But then again, that would lead to some interesting questions about other demands that cannot be realized under capitalism. Perhaps there is something deeply conservative about this hostility to open borders even though the head men at the SWP and Spartacist League love to throw the ultraleft verbiage around.

If you take the trouble to Google “Open borders” on the Militant website, you’ll see that the group favored it in the past. Last week’s Militant erred only by assuming that the party line was in force until it would be changed by the democratic vote of the party at the next convention. Since the cult operates on the whim of the Dear Leader nowadays, the line can be changed any time he decides to change it. Who needs democracy when the group is led by the Lenin of today?

There were 58 results on a search for “open borders” on the Militant and all of them except for the one cited above defend them. For example, the Swedish group that is part of the SWP’s global network ran an election campaign that made such a demand.

In 2010, when I was still a part of the Swans Magazine collective, I wrote an article on the passport system for a special issue on immigration. I reproduce it below in the hope that people get a better idea of where Marxists stand on this issue.

Special Issue on Immigration

 

A History Of The Passport System

 by Louis Proyect

(Swans – October 4, 2010)   When I learned about the decision by the good folks who publish Swans that they intended to produce a special issue on immigration, I saw this as an opportunity to investigate the origins of the passport and visa system — something I regarded as a recent phenomenon. After reading John Torpey’s very useful The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, I was disappointed to discover that such documents have been around for a very long time in one form or another. Upon further reflection, I might have realized that this was the case since state formations — be they feudal, capitalist, or bureaucratic socialist — have been around for over a millennium. The only exception to this rule has been primitive communal societies or nomadic herders. Ironically, it will be up to an aroused and enlightened humanity to reintroduce communal social forms but based on advanced technology to finally put an end to the dungeon that such papers represent.

It is a sign of how little we have progressed that the Roma being persecuted across Europe today for their refusal to abide by the norms of “citizenship” were being persecuted for the same refusal in the 16th century. A police ordinance from 1548 Prussia stipulated that “gypsies and vagabonds” (Landstreicher) had to be issued passes to travel within the feudal state. Furthermore, in all feudal entities the lower classes needed traveling papers, a way of tying a serf to his lord’s manor.

Despite Britain’s reputation for being freer and more “enlightened,” things were not much different. A 1381 statute prevented anybody but aristocrats from leaving the kingdom. (A point on terminology: passports are required to leave a country; visas are needed to enter one.) Britain also had the same determination to keep the peasant tied to his master’s land. A member of the lower classes could migrate from one part of the kingdom to another only if he had a certificate issued by a court official or a cleric.

While Czar Peter the Great had the reputation of being a “Westernizing” progressive, the reality on the ground for the average Russian was one of slavery to documents. Since Peter had the ambition to create a large and powerful army, it was necessary to put obstacles in the way of a peasant who sought to flee this oppressive “duty.” A 1719 edict required someone moving from one village to another to have the proper papers. It is not difficult to understand why Stalin would reintroduce such restrictions during the 1930s since in many ways his regime was a mixture of Czarist autocracy and state planning.

The first blow delivered to such feudal encumbrances was the great French Revolution of 1789, or at least that was the hope. A delegate to the Estates General pleaded that each citizen “must be free to move about or to come, within and outside the Kingdom, without permissions, passports, or other formalities that end to hamper the liberty of its citizens…” Such hopes were in vain since the bourgeois republic reflecting the class interests of those who made it retained passports as a means of controlling the poor who were pouring into Paris.

It was not just the poor who were kept on a tight leash. When King Louis XVI was caught trying to flee the country disguised as a valet, the republicans cracked down. Anybody trying to flee the country without authorization would be subject to arrest, thus making the sublime sentiments of the conclusion of Humphrey Bogart’s Casablanca ring a bit hollow.

Worries over counter-revolution did not only stem from flights from the country. There was also a consensus that foreigners might find their way into France harboring subversive ideas. Subversive in this context, it should be added, meant a belief in the divine rights of Kings. France eventually resolved this problem by abolishing internal passports — in deference to the hopes of the democratically minded and a burgeoning capitalist class in need of “free” labor while institutionalizing them at the border. Henceforth, the concept of “foreigner” would be enshrined in the piece of paper that defined one in relationship to the bourgeois republic.

By and large, the 19th century was marked by a more permissive attitude toward the right to travel without restriction since a capitalist industrial revolution would not be possible without mobile pools of labor, in the same way that California agribusiness relies on an ample supply of Mexican stoop labor today.

Prussia, a state that symbolized absolutism, enacted legislation in 1817 that permitted its citizens to “travel freely and unhindered” without papers, but only within its borders. Leaving the country without a passport was strictly verboten, however.

If Prussia’s restrictions mirrored its inability to break cleanly with the feudal system, how does Britain — an exemplar of liberal free trade — stack up by comparison? As was always the case with Britain, the right to emigrate was joined at the hip to the capitalist economy. An economic downturn in the period 1810 to 1820 prompted bread riots by the poor. In face of such troubles, the ruling class decided to relax restrictions. That explains the enormous migration to Australia and other former colonies that would follow.

Changing economic circumstances in the German states (the country had not yet unified) also led to increased mobility by the 1850s. Liberal-minded industrialists insisted on the right of labor to move freely within and outside the country. This need was felt especially keenly in cases where foreign workers could be used to break strikes. However, the impulse to greater freedoms was countered by traditional German social structures, especially strong in Prussia.

Things came to a head in 1867 when the Reichstag would debate a sweeping legislation that would go the furthest in removing restrictions. If passed, both citizens and foreigners would be allowed to travel to the states within the North German Confederation that included Prussia as well as more economically developed entities.

While the motive of bourgeois politicians was purely to secure cheap labor, the working class representatives to the Reichstag were not prejudiced against legislation that would grant workers more freedom. Wilhelm Liebknecht, the father of Rosa Luxemburg’s close collaborator Karl Liebknecht, made a clarion call in support of the bill.

The fact that some sectors of the capitalist class favor labor mobility today as a way to undermine trade unions in places like the United States and France, just as was the case in Germany in the 1860s, should not stand in the way of our call for freedom of movement.

Lenin, who counted himself as a disciple of the German Social Democracy led by Wilhelm and Karl Liebknecht, was emphatic on this. In a 1913 article titled Capitalism and Workers’ Immigration, he wrote:

Capitalism has given rise to a special form of migration of nations. The rapidly developing industrial countries, introducing machinery on a large scale and ousting the backward countries from the world market, raise wages at home above the average rate and thus attract workers from the backward countries.

Hundreds of thousands of workers thus wander hundreds and thousands of versts. Advanced capitalism drags them forcibly into its orbit, tears them out of the backwoods in which they live, makes them participants in the world-historical movement, and brings them face to face with the powerful, united, international class of factory owners.

There can be no doubt that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land, and that the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner. But only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of this modern migration of nations. Emancipation from the yoke of capital is impossible without the further development of capitalism, and without the class struggle that is based on it. And it is into this struggle that capitalism is drawing the masses of the working people of the whole world, breaking down the musty, fusty habits of local life, breaking down national barriers and prejudices, uniting workers from all countries in huge factories and mines in America, Germany, and so forth.
(Source: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/oct/29.htm)

If anything, Lenin’s observations ring truer than ever. Globalization and advanced communications technology have broken down “national barriers” as anybody who has ever made a call to get technical support from Dell Computers would attest.

Unfortunately, labor solidarity has not kept pace with bourgeois solidarity that forges ahead with trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO. In the coming decades, labor will either face up to the task of realizing the old slogan of “workers of the world unite” or else it will fall backwards into greater and greater restrictions of the sort that typified feudal Europe. There is no turning back.

Is it really 1914 all over again?

This is the probably going to be the last reply to cult leader David North whose WSWS.org website warned readers that nuclear war was imminent because a Pentagon official named Robert Scher told Congress that the USA could “could go about and actually attack that missile where it is in Russia”, referring to any weapon that was in violation of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed by the USA and the USSR in 1987. For North, the crux of the matter was establishing that the word “attack” came out of Scher’s mouth when it was not audible in the Youtube clip.

I never had any big issues with that word one way or the other since my analysis that was based on the objective economic conditions differed radically from that of the Socialist Equality Party and any number of groups or websites constantly warning about WWIII. (A search of WSWS.org reveals 3,350 articles containing the phrase “nuclear war” going back to 1998 when one titled “Risking a Nuclear War” about India and Pakistan can be found.)

The Armageddon brigade includes Global Research that reposted the WSWS.org article and the libertarian Antiwar.com website of Justin Raimondo, who like many others in the Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party lines up with the ultraleft on this matter as has been the case ever since the rightwing internationally has thrown in its lot with the Kremlin. Frankly, it is very difficult to distinguish between what Golden Dawn and North’s cult have said about Ukraine.

For Raimondo, David North, and other assorted hysterics along this ultraleft-libertarian-fascist axis, the danger of nuclear war exists because Washington is out of control and ready to make reckless decisions that will result in the deployment of nuclear missiles that will effectively end life on earth. Raimondo put this this way:

Yes, that’s how crazy the warlords of Washington are: in their demented calculus, nuclear war is just another “option.”

North said about the same thing in a July 2014 article titled “Are You Ready for Nuclear War” that had all the urgency of a Pentecostal tract urging believers to prepare for Armageddon. He likened it to events that took place a century earlier:

A hundred years ago this week, World War I was launched by small cabals of ministers, monarchs, and business interests throughout Europe, whose decision to risk everything on victory in war led to deaths numbering in the tens of millions. Today, similar forces are setting into motion a drive to a conflagration that could lead to the destruction of the planet.

Of course, it is possible to stoke the fears of the naïve reader when you summon up images of a sneak attack on Russia taking place in the next month or so as if the USA might follow Japan’s example from December 7^th 1941.

That being said, one might feel a bit anxious if you interpreted Scher’s comments as a departure from American policy. As I stated (and still believe), the imperialist strategy is based on Mutually Assured Destruction. All nuclear powers consider their arms to be of a defensive nature since a first use would trigger a literal Armageddon that would rob the ruling classes of their privileges and status. It would be a suicidal act only conceivable in a scenario in which the stakes were enormous, such as the Cuban missile crisis that occurred during the depths of the Cold War but as I will point out later, the same conditions do not exist today.

But, more importantly, is the threat of a first strike something new? Did Scher introduce a new and much more dangerous element in American arms policy? A cursory search of Nexis reveals that a “first strike” has been part of imperialist calculations for the longest time.

While we associate such madness with the Reagan administration, Democrats have embraced it as well. In fact it goes back to Jimmy Carter, the “wimp” who Reagan replaced. The NY Times reported on August 6, 1980:

The Carter Administration has adopted a new strategy for nuclear war that gives priority to attacking military targets in the Soviet Union rather than to destroying cities and industrial complexes, Government officials said today.

The revised policy, the officials said, requires American forces to be able to undertake precise, limited nuclear strikes against military facilities in the Soviet Union, including missile bases and troop concentrations. They said it also calls for the United States to develop the capacity to threaten Soviet political leaders in their underground shelters in time of war.

In a nutshell, all Robert Scher was doing is reaffirming nuclear war policy that has existed for the past 35 years.

It continues with Bill Clinton. On November 24, 1998 the NY Times reported:

As NATO defines the new strategy it will unveil on its 50th anniversary next year, Germany’s new Government of Social Democrats and Greens has irked the United States by tentatively suggesting that NATO should renounce the possible first use of nuclear weapons.

The United States is firmly opposed to any change in the doctrine allowing first use of nuclear weapons, arguing that it proved an effective deterrent during the cold war and remains one today against new threats like chemical weapons.

Four years later it should not come as a big surprise that George W. Bush was totally committed to a “first use” policy as the Sydney Morning Herald reported on March 12, 2002:

A secret Pentagon report which reveals plans for a “first-strike” nuclear arsenal reverses decades of American military thinking which effectively defined nuclear warheads as weapons of last resort. It also indicates just how far the Bush Administration is prepared to go to entrench America’s role as the self-appointed global policeman that its military power affords. So dangerous are nuclear weapons to the very continuance of life on Earth that their existence has long been justified because of their power to “deter”, not to defeat. The “Nuclear Posture Review”, however, details plans to integrate nuclear and conventional weapons, develop “bunker-busting” nuclear warheads, and specifically target seven nations. Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria are listed with Russia, China and North Korea as possible nuclear targets.The complex moral, political and strategic questions raised in each of these cases might not trouble the United States, but it will surely unsettle even its closest allies.

One would not expect Obama, a big fan of the Reagan presidency, to retreat from a “first use” policy. The Wall Street Journal reported on April 6, 2010:

The Obama administration will release a new national nuclear-weapons strategy Tuesday that makes only modest changes to U.S. nuclear forces, leaving intact the longstanding U.S. threat to use nuclear weapons first, even against non-nuclear nations.

But the new policy will narrow potential U.S. nuclear targets, and for the first time makes explicit the goal of making deterrence of a nuclear strike the “sole objective” of U.S. nuclear weapons, a senior Obama administration official said Monday.

So if you are going to single out Robert Scher for war mongering, you at least need to understand that he was simply telling the Congressmen what they (and our ultraleftist friends) should have already known. Based on the analysis of David North and Justin Raimondo, we have been on the eve of destruction going on for at least 35 years and counting.

Now it just might be a coincidence but the warnings about WWIII tend to crop up whenever some former colony of the USSR gets on the wrong side of the Kremlin. Back in 2008 when Georgia and Russia were at war over the future of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, you could read exactly the same sorts of articles from the Armageddon brigade. Global Research invoked 1914 just as WSWS.org did in the above-cited article:

So far, each step in the Caucasus drama has put the conflict on a yet higher plane of danger. The next step will no longer be just about the Caucasus, or even Europe. In 1914 it was the “Guns of August” that initiated the Great War. This time the Guns of August 2008 could be the detonator of World War III and a nuclear holocaust of unspeakable horror.

Nobody talks about South Ossetia or Abkhazia today because Russia was able to achieve its goals without any big obstacles put in its path by NATO. Global Research insisted that “Ossetia has been an important strategic base near the Turkish and Iranian frontiers since the days of the czars” as if the geopolitical imperatives of the late 19^th century remain intact.

Of course, if you were serious about the threat of imperialist war, you might want to take the trouble to analyze the world economy as Lenin did when he wrote “Imperialism, the highest stage of Capitalism”. If you are going to invoke 1914, there is after all an expectation that you can make the case that there are irreconcilable conflicts between the West and Russia that can only be resolved by a new world war.

I would only warn you that if you are looking for such an analysis on the WSWS.org website, you will be wasting your time. The tab “World Economy” will point you to articles about “How the richest one percent controls nearly half of global wealth”, etc. but nothing remotely resembling the sort of analysis Lenin carried out. I should add that there’s nothing wrong with writing denunciations of rich people but you don’t really need WSWS.org for that. Huffington Post does as good a job, if not better.

If you are serious about the conflict between the West and Russia having assumed the dimensions of 1914 (or 1940), you are obligated to back up your analysis with data. It would have to examine FDI flows in Eastern Europe and Russia and other economic trends that would lead to the conclusion that war is inevitable. If you want to understand why Japan launched a “first strike” against the US navy in Pearl Harbor, you might want to consult chapter four of Michael Zezima’s Saving Private Power: the hidden history of ‘The Good War’, where he writes:

The build-up to Pearl Harbor began two decades prior to the attack when, in 1922, the U.S., Britain, and Japan agreed that the Japanese navy would not be allowed more than 60 percent of the capital ship tonnage of the other two powers. As resentment grew within Japan over this decidedly inequitable agreement, that same year the United States Supreme Court declared Japanese immigrants ineligible for American citizenship. This decision was followed a year later by the Supreme Court upholding a California and Washington ruling denying Japanese the right to own property. A third judicial strike was dealt in 1924 with the Exclusion Act which virtually banned all Asian immigration. Finally, in 1930, when the London Naval Treaty denied Japan naval hegemony in its own waters, the groundwork for war (and “surprise attacks”) had been laid.

Upon realizing that Japan textiles were outproducing Lancashire mills, the British Empire (including India, Australia, Burma, etc.) raised the tariff on Japanese exports by 25 percent.

Within a few years, the Dutch followed suit in Indonesia and the West Indies, with the U.S. (in Cuba and the Philippines) not far behind. This led to the Japanese (correctly) claiming encirclement by the “ABCD” (American, British, Chinese, and Dutch) powers.

Such moves, combined with Japan’s expanding colonial designs, says Kenneth C. Davis, made “a clash between Japan and the United States and the other Western nations over control of the economy and resources of the Far East and Pacific…bound to happen.”

Is anything like this taking place between the USA and Russia? If so, it would probably come as surprise to the most powerful oil executives in the world. This is from the Kremlin, straight out of the horse’s mouth so to speak:

Shaking hands with the CEO of Exxon-Mobil

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, friends and colleagues,

I am very happy to welcome you to the St Petersburg International Economic Forum. Without a doubt, energy has always been one of the key strategic sectors in the world economy and very much remains so today.

The first steps in this direction are already being taken. Rosneft and ExxonMobil have created a research and development centre for Arctic technologies. I will take this opportunity to also congratulate the winners of the Global Energy Prize awarded today. This year, it was awarded to Japanese scientist Akira Yoshino and Russian researcher Vladimir Fortov. I must note that basic research in the field of energy is what lays the foundation for the future of energy security in our nation and the world overall.

Today, several new documents were signed at this forum on partnerships between Rosneft and international oil and gas companies ExxonMobil, Statoil and Eni (I am happy to see our old friends here today and to greet them), as well as an agreement on technological partnership with General Electric and agreements on the principles of supplying LNG.

This is basically a new era in cooperation the essence of which, as regards our interaction with strategic partners, is to move away from just importing raw materials to establishing full-fledged cooperation in production and technology.

This was a speech given just two years ago. It is a good place to start if you are trying to understand whether we are 5 minutes away from nuclear Armageddon. The conflict in Ukraine, just as was the case in Georgia, raises tensions and leads to saber-rattling.

If you are serious about removing the threat of nuclear war, you have to create a world in which the Russian oligarchs and their pals at Exxon-Mobil do not have the power to exploit the working class and use violence to achieve their ends. Oil companies use their influence over governments in places like Saudi Arabia and Nigeria to make war on their own people and those in bordering territories, as Yemen would indicate.

Russia is just as capable of wreaking havoc on defenseless people as its support for the genocidal policies in Chechnya and Syria would point out. In order to have a world in which social justice and peace prevail, we have to build an international movement that is based on class struggle politics but that rejects the sectarianism that hobbles progress toward that end.

While I doubt that anybody who takes these goals seriously would waste their time joining a bizarre, conspiracy-minded cult-sect like the Social Equality Party, there is a need to understand how they operate and why they ultimately lead to political and personal ruin. My suggestion to David North and company is to continue writing articles that rail against economic inequality since someone here or there might need reminding of that. But for those of us trying to build revolutionary parties based on the kind of rigorous economic analysis that distinguished Lenin or Trotsky, another path awaits us.