Introductory Writings
Why We Left the Socialist Workers Party
by Richard Kirk, Clara Kaye,
Frank Krasnowsky, David Dreiser and Waymon Ware
On behalf of the former Seattle Branch of the Socialist Workers Party
(SWP), and other SWPers who supported the Marxist evaluation of the Negro
Question developed by Richard Kirk, we present this statement explaining
why we left the SWP -- that party to which most of us have devoted our entire
lives since our youth.
ORIGIN OF THE KIRK-KAYE TENDENCY
Our political group, known within the SWP as the Kirk-Kaye tendency, was
formalized at the 1957 convention of the party, when we opposed the unprincipled
adaptation of the SWP to the pacifist-reformist leadership of the Negro
struggle. Adulation of Dr. King replaced a revolutionary approach to the
question within the party, and heralded a process of degeneration which
reached a decisive stage at the 1963 national convention of the party.
In that year, the SWP proclaimed a boycott of the Southern struggle; condemned
leftward-moving SNCC as "reformist/integrationist", and turned
toward Elijah Muhammad and the Black Muslims as the "most dynamic"
section of the Negro movement.
In regard to other areas of the class struggle, the 1963 convention rejected
the perspective of socialist regroupment and deepened its hostility towards
all the new leftward moving organizations on the political scene; the perspective
of political revolution in China was reaffirmed; party organizational procedures
were formally "tightened up" while an ongoing purge of critics
of the leadership was accelerated.
Our tendency opposed this course. We particularly resisted the slanderous
identification of the southern militants with "tokenism," and
the all-out support of Negro separatism.
Our counter-resolution to the convention, "Revolutionary Integration",
called on the SWP to permit its Negro cadre to intervene in the living struggle
for equality with a Marxist program. We developed our thesis that the Negro
movement for equality is a unique and central phenomenon of the class struggle
in the United States, integrally connected with the proletarian struggle
for socialism.
THE SWP EXPOUSES "BLACK SEPARATISM"
The SWP leadership rejected the interconnection of the Freedom Now and socialist
movements. The ease with which the SWP slid over from adaptation to Rev.
King to glorification of Mr. Muhammad expressed the basically false theory
-- inherited from the Communist Party -- that the Negro Question in the
U. S. is only a variation of the National Question in Eastern Europe.
This theory maintains that the Negro problem can be solved by "self-determination"
and racial separation. Thus, all policy problems of the Negro movement can
be solved without strenuous analysis and thought, for the SWP leadership
says in effect that whatever the Negro leadership does is good enough for
the Negroes and good enough for the SWP because whatever policy is most
prominent at any stage has been "self-determined".
The SWP's confusion of the mood of black nationalism with the politics
of separatism bore bitter fruit when Malcolm X engineered a split in
the Black Muslims. Malcolm was clearly oriented toward combining the ghetto
struggle with the southern movement and with socialism. He denounced the
Muslims for their basically reactionary character, and consequently felt
the wrath of Mr. Muhammad's goons. The SWP, supporting Muslim unity, was
caught in its own trap. It became both the supporter of Malcolm and the
defender of his enemy and probable murderer.
The SWP, now discredited in the Negro community, presents the ludicrous
spectacle of an all-white party with a black nationalist program.
OUR PERSPECTIVE ON THE UNFOLDING AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The logic of the SWP's position on the Negro struggle led to a defacto isolation
of the party from the struggle, for black nationalism itself stands aside
from the main thrust of the Negro struggle -- the fight against segregation.
We now felt impelled to publish within the party an analysis of the basic
reasons for the party's sectarianism on this and other vital questions.
Since 1957, we had responded to severe changes occurring in the party program
by formulating our own position on a number of domestic and international
issues. We believed that the party was departing from the dynamic course
dictated by the spirit and letter of Leninism and Trotskyism, and that it
was stagnating into conservatism.
In what proved to be a vain effort to arrest this general drift, we submitted
to the national 1965 Convention an extensive Political Resolution dealing
with the current stage of the crisis of U.S. imperialism and the consequent
strategy and tactics needed for the realization of our revolution. We sought
to orient the party toward the Negro struggle as the crux of the American
Revolution and toward China as the key to the colonial revolution and the
major policy problem of the international revolutionary movement. The Resolution
also called attention to the essentially anti-capitalist nature of the struggle
of women and youth today, and concluded that the road to the American Revolution
did not lie directly through the trade union movement, but followed the
course of the struggles of the most oppressed wherever they broke out. We
said it was the destiny of these struggles outside the labor movement to
become the vitalizing currents that would eventually move the labor movement
and become the vanguard of the revolutionary movement as a whole.
We called for a commitment to the struggles of women under capitalism, and
for the formation of a truly independent revolutionary youth movement.
THE SWP BECOMES MONOLITHIC
The convention rejected our perspective and tactics. Indeed, rank and file
consideration of our Resolution was virtually impossible as the long-honored
internal democracy of the party had by then been destroyed by a protracted
"tightening up" campaign.The majority was hostile to all criticism
and any new proposals emanating from outside the leadership. The proletarian
principle of minority representation on all leading bodies was abandoned
and the very right of factions to exist was denied in a new Organizational
Resolution submitted by the leadership and adopted by the Convention.
The majority simply refused to debate the issues in dispute and discussion
was effectively proscribed. Instead, we were threatened and denounced over
local administrative practices. This type of unprincipled politics was fast
becoming characteristic of the party leadership.
We concluded from this experience that the SWP had become a doctrinaire
party, mired in a "holding operation", i.e. a prolonged state
of suspension based on the assumption that nothing significant can happen
until the revival of the trade unions and the emergence of a Labor Party.
The SWP was ossifying around conjunctural evaluations of 25 years ago, and
neither changes in national or world conditions, the isolation and disasters
resulting from its own mistakes, nor the loss of its basic cadre of revolutionary
Negroes, women, unionists and intellectuals could shake its complacency.
THE LAST STRUGGLE -- OVER ANTI-WAR POLICY
The policy of the SWP leadership in the anti-war movement brought our differences
to the breaking point.
After standing aside from the anti-war movement during its critical formative
stage the SWP decided in mid-1965 to plunge in -- for an organizational
raid.
We made one last attempt to prevent a disaster for Trotskyism in the U.S.
We protested against the single issue, anti-political policy of SWP and
YSA which led them into the presumptuous demand that the Thanksgiving NCC
conference in Washington D.C. center its deliberations around the party's
peculiar and confusing organizational proposals, rather than around questions
of program and principle. This course was unprecedented in our movement.
We denied the SWP characterization of the left wing of the anti-war movement
as "Stalinist." We condemned their fearful refusal to proclaim
clear support to the National Liberation Front and their super-cautious
and outdated policy on the draft, which prevents effective opposition to
it.
We advocated a proletarian anti-war policy that would solidarize the party
with the revolution in Vietnam, with working-class Negro youth who are the
key victims of the draft, and with the radical wing of the anti-war movement.
THE SWP SUBSTITUTES ORGANIZATIONAL
ATTACKS FOR POLITICAL DEBATE
The party's policy in the anti-war movement had never been subject to rank
and file discussion. Comrade Kirk, a member of the National Committee for
25 years, requested a debate on the issue within the NC. He flew to New
York to participate in it, and discovered that the chief results of his
protest were punitive organizational measures directed against him personally,
against the Seattle Branch as a whole, and against other supporters of the
tendency. Such measures are understood within the party to be a prelude
to expulsion.
Under such circumstances, the resignation we had contemplated for some time
became inevitable.
The SWP's estrangement from the Negro struggle and its refusal to intervene
politically in the anti-war movement or in the present rebirth of interest
in socialist thought have removed it for this period from the epicenter
of revolutionary activity and ideology in the U.S. We would welcome a turn
which would reverse this tragic degenerative process, but we cannot wait
for this possibility. There are more vital things to do in the class struggle
than conduct a futile and debilitating internecine organizational struggle
over tertiary administrative issues. Since every political difference and
discussion is now muddied and prejudiced by an organizational smokescreen
thrown over it by the party leadership to obscure the principled issues
in dispute, the party can no longer contain critics. And revolutionaries
who are not critical cannot maintain for long their revolutionary quality.
OUR OBJECTIVES
In resigning, we reaffirm our commitment to Marxism, to Leninism and to
Trotskyism, and we have set forth these immediate objectives:
1. To join
with other independent socialists in the Pacific Northwest in the creation
of a new revolutionary socialist party here.
2. To continue
collaboration with our colleagues throughout the country, with the object
of making our views known to the various components within U.S. radicalism.
3. To advocate,
support and participate in a revival and regeneration of Marxism in the
U. S. and in a fundamental reorganization of socialists in a new revolutionary
socialist party, able to unite the Negro vanguard with the socialist radicals.
We believe this to be the indispensable formula for the foundation of a
genuine revolutionary socialism in this country.
OUR PROGRAM
The following is the gist of the program we have developed and
fought for within the SWP for many years. We are presenting it now publicly
for the first time for the consideration of all revolutionary socialists
and all mass movement militants and radicals.
I. FOR
A REVOLUTIONARY MARXIST
APPROACH TO THE NEGRO STRUGGLE
The connection between the proletarian struggle for socialism and the Negro
struggle for equality is INTEGRAL and proclaims the unfolding of the permanent
revolution in the U.S.
The fascist-like police states of the south are structurally basic to the
capitalist political economy of the U.S. The struggle against segregation,
therefore, threatens the entire nationwide social system. This fact demonstrates
the impossibility of achieving equality under U. S. capitalism, and it further
transforms the demand for integration into a transitional revolutionary
demand. This in turn guarantees the emergence of a revolutionary left wing
that will contend for leadership against the reformist/tokenists in the
civil rights movement.
The development of all-black organizations expresses and cultivates the
pride and self-reliance of the most oppressed, and opens new avenues in
the struggle for freedom. But these so-called "nationalist" formations
do not result from any inherent drive toward national separatism,
but from organizational needs and from an internationalism that identifies
the Negro struggle with the colonial revolution. The demands of the essentially
proletarian masses express the historic needs of the working class as
a whole in the struggle against capitalist exploitation.
No amount of all-black independence can overcome the terrible isolation
of the Negro masses from the white working class and the socialist movement.
What is revealed here is the backwardness of the labor movement and the
theoretical bankruptcy of the established left. This isolation is a mortal
danger both to the freedom struggle and to the struggle for socialism, since
each is impossible without the other.
The Negro struggle is the central question of the American Revolution and
the Negro movement is the vanguard sector of the entire working class. That
is why the Negro movement is the first target of reaction: racism and the
southern system are the launching pads of American fascism.
The Negro movement must be encouraged to develop a Marxist program and cadre
that can unite the ghetto masses with the southern struggle into a powerful
revolutionary force, and there can then be forged a working alliance among
the Negro vanguard, socialist revolutionaries and the militants in the white
working class.
This is the key to the American Revolution.
II. FOR SOLIDARITY
WITH THE CHINESE REVOLUTION
The Chinese Revolution upset the international class peace agreed to at
Potsdam and Teheran. This great revolution confirmed once again the validity
of Trotsky's thesis of permanent revolution by demonstrating that the national
revolution in backward countries cannot achieve its goals of national independence,
national unification and economic growth without going over to the stage
of socialist revolution.
China's experience (not lost on the Cuban revolutionaries) established China
as the key to the colonial revolution and the principal target of world
imperialism.
At first in practice, and then in an ideological polemic against the Soviet
bureaucracy, the Chinese CP opposed the policy of class collaboration with
world imperialism as expounded and practiced by both Stalin and the current
Soviet leadership. The international debate which ensued, forcing world
Communism to examine the issues, began the creation of revolutionary tendencies
who opposed the reformist leaderships throughout the Communist movement.
The necessary prerequisites were thereby established for an international
revolutionary regroupment.
Still, the progressive character of the international role of the
Communist Party of China is severely limited by the residue of Stalinism.
The Khruschev revelations about Stalin at the 20th Congress of the CPSU
revealed the cracks in the Soviet bureaucracy which might have been exploited
by the Soviet workers to the point of political revolution against the entire
regime and the reinstitution of proletarian democracy in the Soviet Union.
But the Chinese Communist Party by its public adulation of Stalin and Stalinism
struck a severe blow at the democratic aspirations of the Soviet proletariat
and thus helped to recement the power of the bureaucratic caste in the Soviet
Union.
The CPC stubbornly maintains Mao's theory -- not fundamentally different
from Stalin's -- that the national revolution in colonial countries can
be carried to fruition by a joint dictatorship of the proletariat and the
native bourgeoisie -- in spite of the CPC's own experience which refutes
this theory!
The disastrous results of the policy flowing from this theory are to be
seen in Indonesia. The Chinese leadership must share responsibility for
the policy followed by the Indonesian communist movement, a policy in no
way distinguishable from that of the CP in China in the twenties in respect
to the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai Shek, and a policy that produced the identical
end: massacre and utter rout.
The CPC's favorable references to Stalin result from this chronic contradiction
in both their theory and practice.
China's internal life, however, differs sharply from the soviet model. Clearly
absent is the immense privileged bureaucracy, wielding arbitrary authority
through an all-powerful secret police. The concentration camps and blood
purges that are the hallmarks of Stalinism are also absent. The expanding
role of the workers and peasants in economic planning and control, have
resulted in a consistent economic growth and a realistic potential for greater
proletarian democracy.
The Chinese Communists are sensitive to the growth of bureaucracy in China.
But they cannot ultimately prevent its growth so long as they remain blind
to its origin and history in the USSR. While the very symbol of bureaucratic
privilege and tyranny -- Stalin -- continues to be idolized in China, they
will hover on the verge of retrogression and degeneration.
Likewise, their Stalinist heritage prevents the CPC from playing a decisive
role in the reorganization of a worldwide revolutionary international.
III. FOR SERIOUS
POLITICS IN THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT
The capitalist class has a fundamental stake in the war in Vietnam and will
not withdraw short of a military/political defeat or virtual civil war at
home. The only way that the American people can stop this war is through
a mass political movement of the working class.
Vanguard elements of the anti-war movement feel their isolation from the
working class to be a basic weakness of the movement; they seek alliances
with the proletariat and specifically with the Negroes, that section of
the working class already in motion. As a consequence of a serious effort
to stop the war, anti-war militants are groping for fundamental solutions
to social problems. They seek to unite Negroes, the poverty-stricken, draft
resisters, radical unionists, socialists, etc. into a broad political movement.
Revolutionary Marxists should help them find the correct road to political
unity by demonstrating the necessity of independent anti-capitalist politics
that connect the war to the other evils of the system. Political ventures
short of such a program are doomed to eventual capitulation to the Democratic
Party and other forms of class collaboration politics.
The liberal plea for "Negotiations" with the Vietnamese Revolution
must be exposed; the only principled slogan is "Withdraw U.S. Troops
Now." But a demand for withdrawal that is devoid of a meaningful economic
analysis of the cause of war, even this slogan fosters the illusion that
the anti-war movement by itself will pressure the U.S. out of Vietnam. The
notion that simply more activism and more protesters can end the war is
an essentially pacifist proposition. This unrealistic and anti-political
approach is a dangerous conservative barrier to the political development
of the antiwar movement.
IV. FOR A
REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH
TO THE WOMAN QUESTION
We place the struggle for women's emancipation
on the level of a first-class theoretical and programmatic question.
As the first tendency in the history of American radicalism to formally
incorporate this question into our basic program, we proclaim our resistance
to the creeping paralysis of male supremacy which by now has become an ingrained
practice in the entire labor and socialist movement, and a growing danger
in the civil rights movement.
The leading role of women in the fight for civil rights, in the anti-war
movement, in civil liberties campaigns, etc. is not accidental, but results
from the special dynamic developed by women as an oppressed sex, seeking
liberation for themselves and for all other victims of discrimination.
The feminine mystique, along with racism, remains the Achilles Heel of the
labor movement and a significant factor in the history of union degeneration.
Women's equality must be raised as a transitional slogan whose dynamism
flows from the pivotal location of the Woman Question in U.S. life, where
the oppression and special exploitation of women is a burning injustice
that intersects with every other political question and social movement.
V. FOR
REVOLUTIONARY UNIFICATION AND
THE REGENERATION OF SOCIALIST THOUGHT
Conditions for a meaningful discussion of Marxist ideology and for the creation
of a united revolutionary socialist party have rarely been as favorable
as they are today.
The essentially anti-capitalist character of the Freedom Now and anti-war
movements draws the militants from both movements together in a search for
political unity. The end of the Stalin era and the current Sino-Soviet dispute
have weakened old prejudices and created an atmosphere favoring political
discussion in the socialist movement. The crisis of capitalism, demonstrated
by the permanent war policy of the Democratic administration and its hypocrisy
in civil rights and anti-poverty, has forced one-time liberals and pacifists
into a serious consideration of Marxism. An entire generation of radical
youth, disgusted by its inheritance, and enthused by the courage and determination
of the colonial revolutionists abroad and the Freedom fighters at home,
is seeking more effective methods and ideas for the struggle against capitalism.
Revolutionary Marxists must accelerate and help give form to this growing
need for a new socialist movement. We must add to the energy, inventiveness,
and boldness of the New Left the most important qualities of the Trotskyist
Old Left: Marxist ideology, a proletarian orientation, experience in the
class struggle, and the recognition of the need for a centralized, disciplined
and thoroughly democratic revolutionary party.
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