Wittenberg, 2021

Octogenarian SWP leader Jack Barnes, with similarly aged Mary-Alice Waters seated at the dais.
(Source: Militant/Dave Wulp)

Just what is to be done, anyway?

You will never find the answer to that question in Terry Evans' and John Studer's account of the Socialist Workers Party's (SWP, aka the Party) conclave (SWP conference: Leading the working class to take power), held this year at Wittenberg University in Wittenberg, Ohio. Such conferences--annual events, but for last year because of the pandemic--have historically taken place at Oberlin College and became known as Oberlin conferences. The venue changed this year because Oberlin College humiliated itself by slandering a local bakery.

The conference had three themes, highlighted on the banner above the podium: 

• Leading the Working Class to Take Power
• Join the Socialist Workers Party!
• Build the Communist Vanguard!

It beggars belief that the SWP--a grouplet of barely 100 comrades--is going to lead the working class to power. 

Socialist revolutions can only be led by parties that have been built and steeled in struggle beforehand. Their members are imbued with the program, the courage and audacity needed to lead millions to take power when it becomes both possible and essential in order to prevent the triumph of reaction.

That's pretty rich coming from cadre whose median age is now over 60 and whose numbers are dwindling through natural attrition. This faith is not based on any historical precedent or material fact--it is simply a religious assertion. They're the chosen people.

The second bullet represents an appeal to those few attendees who were not yet members of the Party--in numbers insufficient to make any material difference. I have no idea what the third bullet means as distinct from the other two.

If those were the three themes of the conference, they are not discussed in Evans' and Studer's article. Instead they highlight three other topics: Malcolm X, Israel, and historical materialism.

The conversation about Malcolm X begins this way:

At the last party conference in June 2019, the banner hanging above the platform read, “Advancing Along the Line of March of the Working Class. Act on Imperialism’s Deepening Political Crisis. Build the Labor Movement. Build the Socialist Workers Party.” No one could have foreseen how today’s capitalist crisis would unfold these last two years, Barnes said, but the SWP acted on what that banner said, never missing a beat in going more deeply to the working class and dealing with challenges posed by the pandemic along the way.

Then follows some boilerplate about how, despite the pandemic, they continued to sell Militants, oppose police brutality, etc., etc. Somehow that segues into this:

Barnes urged participants to read what Malcolm X said about how he had to transform himself to become a revolutionary leader. A precondition for Malcolm acting on his own worth and that of other working people was turning his back forever on the life he led as an uneducated hustler, thief and pimp.

It was in prison that Malcolm started to read and to get his life together. Mr. Barnes claims he was becoming a revolutionary. Instead, he was becoming a devout follower of the Nation of Islam--a religious conversion. Mr. Barnes' own language--"acting on his own worth"--is a weird way of acknowledging that.

What are our elderly comrades, who likely have never smoked a joint in their entire lives, supposed to take away from this? Are they in danger of becoming hustlers, thieves or pimps?

I think Mr. Barnes is reiterating the religious mission of the Party. For if they lose faith in their status as the chosen Vanguard, then the Movement falls apart. Any sense of human worth--much less your "own worth"--stems fundamentally from religious faith. Absent religion, human beings are just animals, and all we usefully do is eat, sleep and fuck.

The second topic--Israel--is introduced this way:

The endurance of Jew-hatred in the imperialist epoch, and its use at times of crisis by the capitalist rulers to divide and crush the working class and its communist vanguard, requires the revolutionary party to champion the fight against it and unconditionally defend the right of Israel to exist today, SWP leader Dave Prince said in the second major conference presentation. It was entitled, “For Unconditional Recognition of Israel as a Refuge for Jews in the Imperialist Epoch: The Stakes for the World Working Class.”

I commend the Party for disavowing the rabid antisemitism found nearly ubiquitously on the American Left. But have they gone too far with this?

If there ever was a chosen people, then it certainly is the Jews. They wrote the Bible--a marvelous and elegant collection of folk wisdom compiled over two millennia and expressed in beautiful language. No other book in the world can compete.

This inspires great envy, and that envy is the source of Jew-hatred. The Germans may have an illustrious and accomplished history--but nothing like the Jews. China may be 5000 years old--but they have produced no book like the Bible. Hinduism can plausibly lay claim to being the world's oldest religion--but they never wrote anything down until recent times.

Everybody envies the Jews, and so even today the Jews are placed at the center of world history. Israel is often held up as the archetype of evil--not because Israel is so sophisticated or threatening, but simply because it's Jewish.

The Party also envies the Jews--but rather than hate them, they want to emulate them. Accordingly they've turned the tables--the Jewish state is no longer the chief threat to world peace. It is instead the key to the coming Revolution! What happens in Israel is somehow very, very important! The Party has put the Jews on a pedestal.

Again--the Party's position is moral, and they don't support Hamas, and for this they deserve credit. But it is a mistake to elevate Israel beyond its status as a small, Middle Eastern country that is home to a persecuted minority. Modern Israel is not really key to anything outside of its immediate neighborhood.

I think Mr. Barnes wants to reinforce his comrades' belief that they are a chosen people, rather like the Jews, which is why he identifies with them. (Besides, I believe many comrades are Jewish, so it makes sense.)

The third topic concerns the importance of historical materialism, which the Party claims has been ignored by the Left. Mary-Alice Waters delivered a speech entitled “Without Historical Materialism There Can Be No Working-Class Unity, No Answer to ‘Wokery,’ No Revolutionary Workers Movement.”

“Historical materialism is under ferocious attack today,” said Waters, “even though you may never hear that world outlook — one of the cornerstones of Marxism — mentioned by name.” The attacks are spearheaded not by the traditional centers of reaction, she added, but by privileged middle-class layers that many consider to be the “progressive” wing of liberal bourgeois democracy.

Historical materialism is the Marxist notion that history is driven by material forces, i.e., economics, and can--at least in broad outline--be predicted. The supposed Marxist advantage is that they understand mechanism by which history works.

The problem with the Marxist view is that it unreasonably elevates economics as history's primary driver. It ignores biological and social evolution, which is not principally about economics. It's about who is most proficient at making babies. The modern world does not look to be very good at that, which is certainly cause for concern. Evans and Studer write

The New York Times  1619 Project was one of the examples of the political war on historical materialism addressed by Waters, as well as “cancel culture” and the counterrevolution on women’s rights represented by the campaign to deny the biological reality of two sexes.

This hints at the true problem: our academic elite's concerns for "transgender rights," for birth control and abortion as positive goods, and for the abolition of the family and all associated traditions and roles--does not augur well for the future of our society. We as a culture will go extinct--with Leftist feminists leading the way to the graveyard.

A vanguard Party has to hold vanguard positions. It can't simply be an Amen Corner for the rest of the Left. By denying the silliest parts of current Leftist ideology, the Party asserts its role as a vanguard, and it also strikes a blow for common sense. I doubt this will prevent the Party from eventually dying out, but it will make it more relevant during its twilight years.

The penultimate paragraph of Evans' and Studer's article is this:

The day after the conference, party supporters met to map out plans for their work organizing the production, printing and distribution of books by SWP leaders and other revolutionaries and raising funds for the work of the party.

That's all they have to say about What Is To Be Done Next. That's it. Raise money and print books.

I will argue that the Party is still a radical Left party, and that it still lies loosely within the Trotskyist tradition. But, unlike when I was a member, it is no longer an activist Party. Instead it's a vaguely religious organization that exists for the spiritual comfort of its own members, and that believes itself to be the Chosen Vanguard.

Further Reading:

• Oberlin, 2019
• Oberlin, 2018
• The 47th SWP Convention