 |
| (Militant/Hilda Cuzco) |
I assume a longer account of the proceedings is forthcoming--I certainly hope so since the banner looks more interesting than usual. I will get to it, but I'm going to be in the Philippines for the next two weeks so there may be a delay.
Further Reading:
 |
| 84 year-old Jack Barnes, leader of the Socialist Workers Party since 1972. (Source) |
“Every class struggle is a political struggle.” With that statement Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers PartyI [SWP - ed], opened his report to an International Socialist Educational Conference in Oberlin, Ohio. ...
Barnes was quoting an 1895 tribute by communist leader V.I. Lenin to Frederick Engels, who along with Karl Marx founded and led the modern revolutionary workers movement. In October 1917, after the horrors of more than three years of imperialist war, the Bolshevik Party, under Lenin’s leadership, led the working class and exploited peasants in Russia to the conquest of power and establishment of the first workers state in history. It was the world’s first victorious socialist revolution.
That is an excerpt from Steve Clark's long article reporting on the 2024 Oberlin Conference held June 13-15, 2024. The article is entitled Forging a proletarian party in the class struggle today.
I previously suggested that there was no Oberlin conference this year, offering to eat crow if I was proven wrong. Well, I had a large helping of finely cooked, elegantly spiced crow for breakfast this morning--in honor of the fact that I'm happy to be wrong, as detailed in my previous article. Why it took Mr. Clark more than two months to write the report, I don't know. I also don't understand why the event wasn't advertised in advance (at least not that I noticed).
I will say the lack of advertising didn't make much difference in attendance--Mr. Clark reports that 330 comrades and friends attended, including visitors from Australia, France, UK, Iceland, Greece and Norway. This is in line with attendance in previous years.
Friend and commenter John B. points out that nothing much of importance seems to have happened this year. And he's right--but this year's report has a noticeably different tone from those of prior years. Previous reports from Oberlin have led off with the topics of the day, followed by (at least in attenuated form) what the Party is gonna do in response.
That's not true this year. Mr. Clark's article is mostly about the past--beginning with that 1895 quote from Lenin. Current events are reserved to the very end, and there is almost no discussion of the Party's tasks for the coming period.
It's all very sentimental. It has a swan-song vibe to it--as if Mr. Barnes is in his final year of leadership. It's more a funeral than a new beginning.
As detailed in my last post, both capitalists and workers have a strong, common interest in maximizing a business's revenue--on that they are very much on the same side. Indeed, labor almost always gets the lion's share of revenue. The necessity to maximize revenue dwarfs the conflict over how it's divided between wages and profits. With no revenue, there won't be either. Marx never understood that.
Quoting Mr. Barnes, Mr. Clark writes,
“Workers and our allies need a party of independent working-class political action — class against class — in factories and other workplaces, in army barracks, and in the neighborhoods, towns and streets where working people live and labor.”
The Party has been demanding this since its inception in 1938. More, this is the key demand of all the "Trotskyist" offspring that this blog covers--they all want an independent working class party. Indeed, Marx and Engels made the same demand in the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. If there ever was a consistent theme in Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism, it's that there needs to be an independent labor party.
In the United States that has never happened. There have been labor parties in other countries--eg, Canada and the UK. And many European countries still have Social Democratic parties, which were originally founded by Marx himself (and led, in Germany, by the redoubtable Karl Kautsky). Yet all labor and social democratic parties have evolved toward "reformism," and in the modern era have faded into insignificance. In Germany recent polling gives the Social Democrats only 14% of the vote.
The reason is because Marxism is wrong. Class struggle does NOT drive human history (though it is a factor, probably minor). Revenue is more important to workers than profit. A zero-sum conflict between workers and capitalists does not exist.
If Marxism were right, then why is the SWP today still a tiny party of 330 comrades and sympathizers with an average age of about 70? They haven't grown. They haven't convinced any large number of people of the correctness of their opinions.
Mr. Clark (describing Mr. Barnes' speech) gives a long list of positions the Party has taken that he says have since proven correct. He touts the most recent political report entitled The low point of labor resistance is behind us (my review here). The major thesis of that book, published in 2022, is that the union movement has been revived and will start growing again. Recent evidence for that are successful strikes at Amazon and Starbucks, and by the UAW.
And the Party was correct (at least in a minor way). In 2022 we had a major labor shortage and all workers--union and non-union alike--were getting significant raises. Whether that caused inflation or was the result of inflation is a chicken-egg question that I won't answer--but it did happen. And it made it look as though unions were on the upswing.
But that's not true today. Today 4+ million new immigrants have joined the labor force. All the help wanted signs that decorated stores and restaurants in 2022 have disappeared. Labor participation rates are at a recent high.
There is no labor shortage. The days of easy raises for employees is over. Indeed, white collar workers--especially in the tech industry--are taking pay cuts, often big ones. That trend may be spreading into the blue collar field as well. The Party was right in 2022. Now it's wrong.
Even if you grant that the Party was right in 2022, it was also wrong. Because many of the successful strikes were by public employee unions, eg, teachers, college professors and grad students, social welfare workers, etc. These are described in loving detail by our friends over at Left Voice, a Trotskyist grouplet made up of college professors and assorted failed academics. But public employees--however occasionally necessary their services--do not improve our standard of living. They're paid from taxes paid involuntarily mostly by working people, and not from revenue which comes from consumers voluntarily spending their money on products they want to buy. Growth in the public employee unions does not represent the revival of the labor movement.
The Party--to its great credit--has mostly championed revenue-making businesses that actually improve our lives. Their candidate for mayor of Chicago in 2023, Ilona Gersh, was a good example of this.
Among the most ludicrous of the supposedly correct positions is (italics in original),
The Socialist Workers Party said, “No!” U.S. imperialism has lost the Cold War, not won it. The fall of the Stalinist apparatuses eliminated a class-collaborationist crutch the imperialist rulers had relied on for more than six decades to undermine national and class battles the world over and block extension of the socialist revolution.
Note to Mr. Barnes and all other comrades: The US won the cold war. The Soviet state, born of the supposedly successful Russian Revolution of 1917, has disintegrated. Russia is but an empty husk of its former self, suffering demographic, economic, technological, and now military decline. Even if it somehow wins the war in Ukraine, it will be a pyrrhic victory that won't help at all.
But Mr. Clark does correctly note that world disorder is increasing. Some of that is technological: eg, the Houthis are firing thousand dollar drones at ships in the Red Sea while the US Navy is shooting them down with million dollar missiles. This is obviously unsustainable.
Or put more generally, because of the Soviet Union the US had to acquire allies around the world. It did that by bribing them with foreign aid, by granting them tariff-free access to US markets, and by militarily guaranteeing their borders from invasion. But today the Soviet Union is no longer a threat. We don't need all those allies, and countries that used to get aid from Uncle Sam (Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Egypt, South Africa, etc.) are just shit out of luck.
We're the most self-sufficient country on Earth.
Like their Trotskyist competitors, the Party is obsessed with the word imperialism. It's an imaginary boogeyman invented by Lenin designed to bamboozle the ignorant. At bottom, it's just a giant conspiracy theory. The word fragment imperial- occurs in Mr. Clark's essay 31 times. This is just meaningless Trotsky-talk.
The Party takes the honorable position on two issues. First, it truly understands that Hamas is a murderous, fascist organization. The compare Hamas to Nazis. The comparison isn't wrong, but I think it's more precise to compare them with the Khmer Rouge. They're not motivated by ideological fascism so much as just murderous nihilism. If there's any method to Hamas's madness, I certainly don't know what it is.
Second, they understand that the egregious lawfare against Donald Trump is an attack on the basic civil liberties of all Americans. The SWP has long defended civil liberties, going all the way back to the Smith trials of the 1950s. Their defense of Trump is entirely consistent with that proud tradition. Kudos.
The final paragraph of Mr. Clark's report is this.
It’s along that historic line of march, Barnes said, that a tested proletarian party will be forged in class battles, capable of organizing and leading the great working-class majority in the United States in a mass revolutionary movement that will decide which class will rule.
Big words, that. Mr. Barnes likely expressed that same thought 52 years ago when he first became National Secretary. In the intervening decades it doesn't look like he's made any progress. Indeed, the opposite. His tiny band of aging comrades are not the next generation of fighters, and Mr. Barnes--still pretty fit for an 84 year-old--looks every bit his age.
The Good Bye has taken too long. The Socialist Workers Party needs new leaders and a new program.
Further Reading:
It appears that there was no Oberlin Conference this year.
I could be wrong. But here it is--three weeks into July--and there is no report on the Oberlin conference. What's more, I don't recall any previous mention of the conference in recent issues of The Militant. Usually they advertise said conferences in advance, inviting people sympathetic to the Party to attend.
The Party refers to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and said Party has been hosting annual conferences ever since I was a member (beginning in 1969), and then probably for years before that. Those conferences have traditionally occurred on the campus of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio--though in 2021 and 2022 they were moved to Wittenberg College. Because of the pandemic, no conference was held in 2020, which would be the only year they've missed in at least 55 years.
Until this year. Or so it seems. Maybe I'm just jumping the gun and next week there will be a full account in The Militant (the Party's newspaper) on the Oberlin Conference. Or maybe the conference has been delayed for some reason and will happen later this Summer, as happened in 2021.
I hope I'm wrong. I'll be happy to eat my words, or eat crow, or whatever it is an ex-comrade has to eat when he gets it wrong--but if the Oberlin conference really didn't happen this year, that would be bad news. My last post was entitled Is Trotskyism Dead?, and it appears it was prescient.
I can only think of three possible reasons why.
First, perhaps the Party's leaders are just too old. The National Secretary (CEO) is Jack Barnes, born in 1940, turns 84 this year. He's served as leader since 1972, or 52 years. That's longer than Stalin (30 years) or Mao Tse-Tung (32 years) reigned as head of their respective Communist Parties. Comrade Barnes has even out-lasted his bff Fidel Castro, who ruled from 1976 to 2008, retiring at the youthful age of 82.
It's pretty obvious that the SWP has a leadership succession problem.
It's not just Mr. Barnes, but the second member of the Troika (my term for the Party's leadership) is Mary-Alice Waters. She, along with Comrade Jack, graduated from Carleton College in the early sixties--whether at the same time or a year or two apart, I don't know--but she is approximately Mr. Barnes' age. Indeed, she's been his lifelong companion--and at least for much of that time his main squeeze. Party leadership apparently runs in the family.
The third member of the Troika (that's why it's called a Troika) is Steve Clark. Comrade Clark is much younger than Comrades Barnes & Waters--indeed, I think he's younger than I am, which suggests he's about 71 or 72.
Oberlin conferences come in two flavors. In most years they are an Educational Conference, held mainly to get comrades together and touch base with the big ideas. In some years they are a Convention (the last one took place in December, 2022) where the Party approves a new program (called the Political Report) and supposedly elects new leadership. I have compiled the attendance at recent Oberlin conferences here.
Either way--whether it is a Political Report or simply a Keynote Speech--Comrade Barnes has to prepare a major presentation. Plus he has to be physically able to travel. I'll suggest that he is no longer able to complete one or both of those tasks, and therefore leadership succession in the Party becomes an urgent issue.
The second possible reason for no conference is that they're running out of money. As commenter John B wrote here, the Party (as of 2023) has only $6 million left from the $20 million horde it got by selling its building. That cash has to subsidize publication of The Militant, along with costs associated with Pathfinder Press.
A third possible reason--depressing in its own way--is that there is nothing to talk about. The median age of our comrades is probably about 70, they've all attended dozens of Oberlin Conferences, and the notion that they somehow require more "education" seems silly. Plus the travel costs are expensive.
The Party is running candidates for US president and vice-president this year--Rachele Fruit and Dennis Richter, respectively. They're doing their usual respectable job of campaigning--its obviously on a small scale, but nobody can accuse them of lack of professionalism. They are working to get on the ballot in at least a few states, notably Tennessee and Vermont.
But their program doesn't inspire. Rachele Fruit says it all: ‘Workers need to form our own party, a party of labor’. A true Trotskyist demand is a demand on the bourgeoisie, and not an exhortation to the working class. Beyond saying that the "ruling class" is evil and does not rule in workers' interests, the Party doesn't demand of the rulers to do anything hard or impossible. There is no demand similar to what Trotsky describes in the Transitional Program.
Indeed, their demand is identical to all the other so-called Trotskyist grouplets. Left Voice's lead slogan is The Presidential Debate Showed the Time Is Now to Build a Party that Fights for Immigrant Rights, Workers’ Needs, and Socialism. (With a title like that who needs to read the article?)
If the SWP styles itself as the Vanguard Party, then Jeff Mackler, while nominally the head of the mostly defunct group Socialist Action, stands alone as the vanguard of the proletariat--I call him Vanguard Man.
Vanguard Man ran for president (of the USA) twice, in 2016 and again in 2020. Mr. Mackler is roughly Jack Barnes' age (perhaps a bit older), which means he's older than Joe Biden. And it showed--apart from a brief tour of southern New England there was no further activity. For some reason Mr. Mackler chose to run again in 2020, running a similarly lackadaisical campaign. Indeed, it was a lot like Mr. Biden's campaigning from his basement. I had fun mocking the attempt with headlines like Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again and Jeff Mackler Quits 2020 Race!
Unfortunately my comedic routine won't be repeated this year--Mr. Mackler appears not to be running in 2024. It seems he has health problems--expected of an 84 year-old--and is no longer able to travel very much. Which means the working class is screwed--after all, once Vanguard Man is gone, there will be nobody left to lead the Revolution. The imperialists will win.
As far as I know, Mr. Mackler has not endorsed any other candidate for president. Apparently none of them rise to the class consciousness of our Vanguard Man. After all, having spent 30 years as a California school teacher and living now probably 30 years into retirement receiving a generous pension from the Golden State--Mr. Mackler surely knows what it's like to be a poor, miserable oppressed worker--just like the shlub at Walmart with no health insurance (who's gonna vote for Trump!).
Compared to comrades Mackler, Barnes and Waters, Joe Biden is a spring chicken--a perfect symbol of youth. But it appears that time has caught up to him as well.
The SWP, despite their advancing age (or perhaps because of it) knows better what the real working class is about:
 |
| Laura Garza leading comrades in prayer (MILITANT/ARTHUR HUGHES) |
The news piece highlights the report given by Jack Barnes, the national secretary and Party's chief honcho. We're told that 333 people attended the conclave, including representatives from Canada, the UK and Australia, which seems around average for prior years. The article lists the agenda in a series of bullet points, which I quote here in shortened format.
In addition to defense of constitutional freedoms, the report by the party’s national secretary adopted by the June 12 leadership meeting focused on:
- The centrality of organizing solidarity through the unions ...
- Why advancing women’s emancipation cannot be reduced to the fight for the decriminalization of abortion. ...
- The necessity of a proletarian internationalist course. ...
- Why the unions must lead in forging an alliance of workers and exploited farmers ...
- Why achieving any of these goals requires the working class and trade unions to break from the Democrats, Republicans ...
- Advancing the revolutionary fight by the working class to remove state power, including the power to make war, from the ruling class and to establish a workers and farmers government that, as the SWP Constitution says, “will abolish capitalism in the United States and join in the worldwide struggle for socialism.”
The Party is justly proud of its defense of Constitutional rights, which has been a tradition since its founding. Indeed, I'm proud to say that I've been consistent on the subject as well, defending the SWP's right to free speech and to equal treatment under the law back when I was a comrade, and extending the same defense to Donald Trump and his followers today. Clark & Evans point out that
The same espionage statute wielded by Biden against Trump was used in 1918 to jail Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs for his support for the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution and opposition to U.S. imperialism’s predatory aims in World War I.
The SWP is the only organization on the Left that I'm aware of that is consistent in its support of Constitutional rights for ALL citizens, including both Trump and Debs (and James Cannon imprisoned under the Smith Act). For this it deserves considerable credit.
The Party's statement on women's rights is also more sensible than you'd expect. They write,
The starting point in the battle for women’s emancipation, Barnes said, is recognizing and addressing the growing social and economic crises that prevent working people starting families and providing for them. That means fighting for jobs with wage rates, work schedules and conditions that make family time possible — time for social activity together, sports, recreation, caring for children who are sick or need help with their homework, help for the aging. Time for family members to read, to take part in union, political and cultural activity.
Astonishingly, the Party is both pro-child and pro-family, which makes their decades-long championing of abortion rather embarrassing. The topic was debated during last year's convention, which resulted in the book The low point of labor resistance is behind us, which I reviewed here. Abortion, instead of being legalized should now only be decriminalized. I'm not sure what the difference is, but the latter makes it sound less important. Mr. Barnes goes on to say
The political course pursued by Democrats, the middle-class left and leaders of today’s bourgeois-minded women’s organizations, however, heads in the opposite direction, Barnes said. They reduce the fight for women’s rights to abortion access, campaigning for capitalist (almost always Democratic Party) politicians and “breaking the glass ceiling” to get more women into well-remunerated professional and managerial positions.
The Party is much more sensible than their nuttier comrades on the Left, who believe in 52 genders and that a man can transition into a woman simply by putting on a dress. The Party actually believes in fertility, which places them in the realm of sane political discourse.
But I won't go along with their communist project to socialize all childcare. This is a totalitarian project.
The commentary article tells us that a "proletarian internationalist course" actually consists of: solidarity with the Cuban "revolution."
The socialist conference opened with a political report by Mary-Alice Waters. Having led three political trips to Cuba this year by teams of cadres in the SWP and broader communist movement, Waters focused, among other topics, on political and leadership lessons of Cuba’s socialist revolution and Washington’s intensifying efforts to crush it.
The news yields a bit more information:
Barnes pointed to the global media blitz Washington has begun cranking up, alleging Chinese government spying operations in Cuba — charges Cuban leaders rebutted as “mendacious and unfounded” lies. Such false charges, the SWP leader said, are in line with the Biden administration’s course — building on that of the Trump White House and every Democratic and Republican administration for some 65 years — to overturn the socialist revolution in Cuba.
That's it--endless solidarity and uncritical acceptance of everything the Cuban government says is all there is to internationalism.
The Party's union work is so small scale and unimportant that it's barely worth mentioning. To wit:
Organizing solidarity is the backbone of work to strengthen the unions. Barnes pointed to the recent example of eight rail workers, all members of SMART-TD Local 1373, joining the picket line of striking Teamsters at Liberty Coca-Cola Beverages in Philadelphia last month. They brought several hundred dollars to donate to the strike fund.
Eight workers and a few hundred dollars adds up to a hill of beans. For what it's worth, the Party doesn't participate in what is probably the most viable union movement around: Labor Notes. I posted a piece on that, and in the comments I point out why I think the SWP abstains. I stand by that comment.
Similarly, getting the unions to break with Democrats is a lost cause--the Democrats have all the money and also power to change labor laws. More, unionists intrinsically understand economics better than my Trotskyist friends, blinded as they are by Marxist theology. The issue is about divvying up the producer surplus, not about who owns the means of production. The unions have got that right.
The last bullet point is simply a religious assertion--it has no practical consequence whatsoever. It is to Trotskyism what Judgement Day is to Christianity. But, beyond narrow pork barrel issues, it's a religious and moral impulse that motivates humans to engage in politics at all. And that's the role of the last bullet--it puts everything into moral perspective and justifies all the efforts (however futile) in trying to get from here to there.
The photo of Ms. Garza highlights the commentary article, and frankly "prayer" was the first word that came to my mind when I saw it. I doubt Ms. Garza experienced it that way, but if she's talking about that last bullet point--the ultimate purpose of the whole thing--then prayer is exactly what it was. And so, however unintentionally, The Militant's photographer and editor have accurately illustrated what the Socialist Workers Party is all about.
Amen, Amen!
Further Reading:
 |
| Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes addresses conference. Source: MILITANT/HILDA CUZCO |
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) held its annual shindig this year at Wittenberg University, June 9 - 11. The Militant article reporting on the event is entitled Taking the Socialist Workers Party’s program to the toilers. As usual, the title doesn't really say much about the actual content.
It's a very strange article, from which I infer big changes are afoot within the SWP.
I'll begin with a nitpick. They write
[Jack Barnes] was speaking to some 350 people at the SWP-sponsored International Active Workers Conference in Springfield, Ohio, June 11.
This year’s annual gathering, the largest since 2009, drew attendance from 10 countries...
I went back and checked, going back as far as 2016. The 2018 Active Workers Conference hosted "nearly 400 participants." So somebody is fudging the numbers--not a good idea when they know I'm gonna call them out on that.
Back to the weird stuff: First, the article is very long. Few Militant articles are longer than a double-page spread, but this one includes an additional full page.
Second, they're calling a convention for December, 2022. Why not wrap up the convention during their stay at Wittenberg? I speculate that the pre-convention discussion will be more intense than usual and they want to give it some time. The political content of the current article is confusing, to say the least. It will take a convention to clear it all up--if indeed they intend to do that.
Finally, the authorship is different. The Militant reports from Active Workers Conferences in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021 were all authored by Terry Evans and John Studer. (There was no conference in 2020, and 2016's report was authored by Naomi Craine.) This article is penned by Terry Evans and Steve Clark.
Mr. Clark is third in command at the SWP, following only Jack Barnes and his main squeeze, Mary-Alice Waters (though Wikipedia claims he's in a gay relationship). Mr. Clark writes for The Militant only when something serious is happening (e.g., here*). Meanwhile, commenter John B seems to suggest that "Terry Evans" (a pseudonym) is the Great Successor, i.e., next in line to succeed Mr. Barnes as National Secretary.
In other words, the Big Guns are writing this post, shoving the work-a-day reporter John Studer aside. This implies there is something more important than usual going on.
For more tea leaves we need to consider the article itself. I'll take on two topics. In both cases they start out with provocative rhetoric, only to retreat to Trotskyist boilerplate.
The first is Ukraine. They write,
The [National Committee] statement gives unconditional support to the fight for Ukrainian independence and sovereignty and demands an immediate end to Moscow’s military operations and occupation.
It demands a halt to all U.S. economic, banking, and trade sanctions against Russia, whose devastation falls overwhelmingly on working people in Russia, undercutting solidarity between workers and soldiers in the two countries. The statement also demands Washington withdraw all its nuclear weapons and armed forces from Europe.
This is the standard Trotskyist position, held by almost everybody on my beat. They oppose "US imperialism" even if it helps a cause they support, i.e., an independent Ukraine. Like the others, they object to sanctions against Russia and US arms shipments to Ukraine. But...
During a lively question and answer session after Studer’s report, one participant asked whether an SWP candidate elected to Congress would support the U.S. government sending arms to Ukrainians.
“We have no quarrel with how Ukrainians get arms to defend themselves from Moscow’s assaults,” Studer said. “But the longstanding proletarian internationalist position of the communist movement is and remains, “Not one dime, not one soldier for the U.S. rulers and their war machine! No political confidence in the bosses’ government!”
The U.S. rulers do nothing other than advance their own capitalist interests in everything they do. If they extend military aid, it comes with unprincipled strings attached. ...
With the phrase "we have no quarrel...", Clark & Evans point out the obvious contradiction in their position, namely Ukraine's defense depends crucially on weapons from "imperialist" countries. So, unlike their competition, they are aware that what they say makes no sense. More, "lively Q&A" is not something I associate with SWP conclaves--which suggests that the position is under contentious debate. I'm led to expect something beyond boilerplate after the December convention.
The second red flag is the abortion ruling (which was only a leaked draft when Clark & Evans' article was written). Here is the shocker:
In 1973 the Militant hailed as a victory the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision overturning laws in 46 states that restricted a woman’s access to abortion during the first three months of pregnancy.
“Fifty years of experience in the class struggle have taught us that judgment was inaccurate,” said SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters in opening her conference report. “It soon became clear that the court edict set back the fight to repeal all laws criminalizing or restricting abortion.”
In other words, their support for Roe v Wade was a mistake. Who knew? But again, "lively discussion" ensued, yielding the following exchange:
In the question and answer session later that day, one participant disagreed with Waters’ assertion that an overturn of Roe v. Wade would be positive. She asked Waters what she meant when she said in her report that “the SWP is the party of life, not death.”
“Getting Roe out of the way will create an opportunity for working people to have the discussion we need,” Waters replied. “The job of the courts is not to impose legislation,” as it did in this case, “but to uphold rights and protections that have been wrested from the ruling class in struggles going back to the Bill of Rights.”
So it certainly sounds like they're gonna come out against abortion. But nope, they retreat back to Trotskyist boilerplate, as the next sentence in the quoted paragraph proves.
The 1973 ruling was an obstacle to fighting for access to safe and secure abortions, which is just one part of the broader working-class fight for both women and men today, she said.
I predict that the December convention will either reaffirm the Trotskyist boilerplate positions, or conversely double down on support for American policy in Ukraine and also for a consistent pro-life position.
I also suggest that the December convention may bring with it a change in leadership. Mr. Barnes is too old to be running a Party. Will the new leader be Steve Clark, Terry Evans, or somebody else?
A few other random comments:
The analysis of global politics (beginning with the sentence "But the so-called American Century abruptly came to an end before it had barely begun, ...") is not true. For a better and much clearer analysis, please read Peter Zeihan's latest book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning.
Pathfinder Press' latest book is Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity. It's a collection of essays by Frederick Engels, George Novack, Karl Marx and Mary-Alice Waters. Oddly, it's favorably reviewed (pdf) by Peter Wood, professor emeritus of anthropology (Boston University) and current president of the right-leaning think tank, the National Association of Scholars.
I'm skeptical the book is of much value. Any work of anthropology that doesn't include human genetic evolution is now hopelessly dated. Obviously Marx, Engels and Novack knew nothing about the subject, and I doubt Ms. Waters is any wiser. Mr. Wood should certainly know better--and maybe he does, but is too polite to say so.
* The link is to my article, which contains links to The Militant. These now yield a "page not found" error. For some reason the entire discussion has been deleted by the paper.
Further Reading:
 |
| 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:
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:
 |
| From left, John Studer, Dave Prince, Holly Harkness, Steve Clark, Jack Barnes (speaking), Mary-Alice Waters, Norton Sandler, at closing session of SWP conference June 15. Banners summarized continuity of Socialist Workers Party since 1919 founding of first communist party in U.S. and other Active Workers Conference themes. (Picture and Caption Credit: The Militant/Arthur Hughes) |
 |
| Photo Credit: The Militant/Carole Lesnick |
In his political report, “100 Years ‘On the Right Side of History,’” Barnes said that the SWP is the only party in the U.S. whose continuity as communists is unbroken. Other groups once claiming that continuity to the Bolsheviks tossed it aside — in deeds long ago, but more recently in words as well. Some, like the International Socialist Organization, have imploded and dissolved, with many ISO leaders and members going into the Democratic Party. Other organizations are well along the way.It begs the question: If the SWP is so correct, then why is it so small? Surely if Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism/Barnesism is correct, then some popular recognition of the One True Revolutionary Party must follow. Either the SWP is wrong, or Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism/Barnesism is wrong. Or (most likely) both are wrong.
As working people face the grinding effects of the capitalist rulers’ economic, political and moral crisis and their wars abroad, SWP candidates and campaign supporters call for independent working-class political action, Barnes said. They point to the necessity for working people to break with the bosses’ government and state, as well as their twin parties, the Democrats and Republicans.In a world where unemployment is at record lows, profits are at near record highs, and indicators of well-being (airplane travel, new cars sold, cheaper prices for consumer goods) as good as ever, it stretches credulity to think we're in a "crisis." Of course there are problems. Does the Party even suggest that it will eliminate all problems? Some of the problems are serious. But to suggest that we're at an end-of-the-world, cataclysmic crisis of capitalism/imperialism is not believable.
[Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez [AOC--ed] promotes a “Green New Deal,” backed by many of the Democrats running for president, as the central vehicle to accomplish this. She says, “We are facing a national crisis,” a catastrophe from fossil fuels and “climate change,” that requires a massive strengthening of the capitalist state to address it. And, she adds, the massive mobilization it would mount would create jobs.AOC suggests a Second World War style mobilization of the American people, just as Roosevelt did in 1941.
“When FDR called on America to build 185,000 planes to fight World War 2, every business leader, CEO, and general laughed at him,” the “talking points” for the Green New Deal Ocasio-Cortez released says. “At the time, the U.S. had produced 3,000 planes in the last year. By the end of the war, we produced 300,000 planes. That’s what we are capable of if we have real leadership.”Such a mobilization is necessary to fight "climate change", says AOC. A side benefit is it will employ all workers, just as fighting the Nazis reduced unemployment in the 1940s.
Like Roosevelt’s New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats today view workers and farmers as the objects of government policies to be administered, rather than people who are not only capable of fighting to change the conditions the bosses and their governments impose on us, but to transform themselves through that fight to take political power.And so it comes: The Militant opposes big government for precisely the same reasons that I do--namely it infringes on individual liberty. The government has no right to "administer" our well-being.
 |
| SWP Oberlin Conference Attendees (Photo credit: Mike Shur; The Militant) |
Published weekly except for one week in January, one week in June, one week in July, and one week in December.So it's odd that the paper missed four issues, from that dated June 10th until the issue dated July 8th (posted on the web today). Are they still gonna take the week off in July?
Our conception of the party is radically different. For us the party must be a combat organization which leads a determined struggle for power. The Bolshevik party which leads the struggle for power needs not only internal democracy. It also requires an imperious centralism and an iron discipline in action. ...
For the proletarian revolutionist the party is the concentrated expression of his life purpose, and he is bound to it for life and death. He preaches and practices party patriotism, because he knows that his socialist ideal cannot be realized without the party.Big words, that. And I know that's the intention, but the reality is different. First, it's not really a democracy--Jack Barnes has held the leadership post since 1972! No genuinely democratic organization would tolerate that. All self-proclaimed vanguard parties share the problem, notably Jeff Mackler at Socialist Action (in office since 1984), and the recently collapsed International Socialist Organization (because of a leadership sex scandal). And second, it stretches credulity to think the SWP is "combat organization." Just look at the picture above. They're too old. Does the friendly church lady in the front row look like she's ready for combat?
A Lorain County jury June 7 ruled in favor of a lawsuit by Gibson’s, a family-owned and operated bakery, and its proprietors David and Allyn Gibson, against Oberlin College and Meredith Raimondo, the vice president and dean of students of the northern Ohio college.She relates the key events.
The Gibson’s complaint described how Raimondo and other Oberlin College authorities orchestrated a demonstration outside the bakery and distributed a libelous flyer saying its “owners racially profiled and discriminated against” three students. The students had been arrested after one of them tried to use a fake ID and shoplift two bottles of wine from the bakery on Nov. 9, 2016, and then pummeled a store employee who pursued them.
The three students, who are Black, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, including theft, in 2017, and acknowledged that the shop owners’ response had not been racially motivated.When the guilty parties acknowledge that their accusers aren't racist, that pretty much closes the case. Nevertheless, with campus connivance, students organized large protests in front of the bakery accusing them of "racism". The College (the bakery's biggest customer) discontinued any commercial relationship.
The subjugation of women “isn’t inherent to human nature,” Waters said. Its origins aren’t in conflicts between men and women but “entwined with the way communal structures of preclass society disintegrated."Subjugation" is surely the wrong word--women are not always or even mostly subjugated. They didn't die by the tens of thousands in the trenches of World War I, for example. But the point is taken--women's roles in society are very different from that of men. Sometimes they're subjugated.
These ranged from joining strikes and others workers’ and union battles, to activities supporting working people in Puerto Rico combating the devastation of U.S. colonial rule; from campaigning in workers’ neighborhoods with the Militant and books by revolutionary leaders; to participating in book fairs in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, the Philippines, and Cuba — and much more, as described each week in this working-class newspaper.Beyond this is a short description of efforts at Pathfinder Press, led by Holly Harkness. Two new comrades are introduced to us--elsewhere in the issue the death of Wendy Lyons is reported. So net recruitment is one.
The prospects opened by the Singapore summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean head of state Kim Jong Un, which concluded two days before the SWP gathering, are good for the working class, Barnes said — not just in the U.S. and Korea, but in Japan, China, and across the Pacific and the world.Of course that's true--only a Democrat full of sour grapes could disagree.
Trump has also raised withdrawing some of the 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea — a proposal he first mooted during the 2016 elections — in exchange for the North Korean government taking steps to dismantle its nuclear missile program. The SWP calls, Barnes said, “For a Korean Peninsula, Japan and surrounding skies and waters free of nuclear weapons.”Beyond Korea, I'll take partial issue with this statement:
The current White House, Barnes said, has ceased acting on the false premise, one that has guided the last several Democratic and Republican administrations alike, that “the U.S. rulers can dominate the world unopposed in the mistaken belief they won the Cold War.” While Washington maintains massive military superiority over other world powers, it can no longer simply impose U.S. capital’s will through bloody wars — wars that have now gone on, from Syria to Afghanistan, for more than 17 years. Instead, the current administration is seeking to advance U.S. imperialist interests by moving to end some longstanding conflicts and pull in its horns to a degree, at least for now.I agree with Mr. Barnes that the US is withdrawing from world conflict, and is no longer willing to act as the world's policeman. But I object to the idea that this is from a position of weakness. We supported our allies during the Cold War because we needed them. Now that we've won that conflict we no longer require their services--they'll have to fend for themselves. Then, as Peter Zeihan points out, fracking changes everything. We're no longer dependent on Persian Gulf oil, and accordingly our willingness to compromise with Iran about nuclear weapons is greatly diminished.
Washington also sent President Trump’s son-in-law and White House Adviser Jared Kushner to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt in late June to discuss the next stages in advancing its Mideast peace plan, Barnes said.I'll take it as an opportunity to remind readers that the Party's position on Israel is now quite sensible. They have sharply distanced themselves from openly antisemitic groups like Hamas. Instead--like me--they understand that a better life for Palestinians does not imply the complete destruction of Israel. Indeed, there are some obvious win-win solutions for that conflict, and it is only groups like Hamas that refuse to consider them.
Despite the U.S. rulers’ intentions, these moves — from Korea to Moscow to the Middle East — can have positive results for the working class and toilers, helping to open much-needed political space to organize; to gain class-struggle experience against their respective capitalist ruling classes; to strengthen ties of workers solidarity across imperialist-stoked national and religious divisions; and to take steps toward the building of new working-class leadership.I don't know what that's about. I think it's meaningless Trotsky-talk. Unlike Mr. Barnes, I have no telepathic connection to "U.S. rulers", and I can't tell you what their intentions are. But if you get rid of phrases like that, and other words like class struggle, imperialist, working class, etc., which collectively add nothing to the conversation, I think the Party's analysis of world affairs corresponds closely to mine.
