WflRltERS "'N'IJ'RIJ 25

No. 11
France
Four
Years
Later
The French general strike of May-June 1968
was the largest in history: ten million workers
struck and paralyzed the entire country. Since
then, DeGaulle has been ejected by the 1969
referendum which took place in the wake of the
strike, but the bonapartist government which he
left behind remains intact, although in an in-
creasingly precarious position. The working class
is increasingly restless, the French economy
faces rising economic difficulties, and the gov-
ernment has been shaken by several financial
scandals in the last year. In response the Com-
munist Party and the Socialist Party have been
obliged to conclude an electoral agreement which
could lead to a repeat of the 1936 Popular Front
government. The five-year term of the parlia-
ment elected in 1968 is almost over, and the
forthcoming elections (which must take place
sometime between now and March 1973) have
been at the center of the tactical preoccupations
of the French left. Le Monde, France's leading
bourgeois paper, was no doubt correct when it
termed the CP-SP agreement the most important
event on the French parliamentary left since 1936.
These developments take place in the context
of the class struggle in France and internationally
and the evolution of inter-imperialist rivalries.
Jlilitancy on the Rise
Since 1968, there has been an upsurge in the
subj ecti ve militancy of the French working class,
which has again begun to use tactics with a long
history in the working-class movement and which
were brought back to the fore by the 1968 events.
Thus factory occupations, taking factory managers
hostage, unlimited strikes (as opposed to 24-hour
strikes or revolving work stoppages, " g r ~ v e s
tournantes," which had been the norm in France
in the immediately preceding period) have in-
creased in number and frequency. In addition,
physical confrontation between strikers and the
forces of the state has significantly escalated.
In one case, strikers created an oil fire with
flames fifty feet high to keep police and scabs
out of the factory.
But the subjective heritage of 1968 is not un-
mixed. The 1968 strike far surpassed the general
strike of 1936 in size but the gains won in 1968,
although real, were qualitatively less than those
of 1936 and have been largely wiped out since
then by inflation and the bourgeoisie's counter-
offensive. The working class feels that it was
cheated-and rightly. even if this sentiment has
not focused clearly on its proper target, the
French CPo Since 1968, working-class militancy
has been strongest in marginal industries in
which the union movement had been weak or, in
some cases, non-existent. In that sense, organi-
September 1972
Not a Lesser Evil, but a Workers Party!
Labor and the
Elections
The process of the 1972 elections ties together all the strands of failure of the last seven years
of American radical politics. Nixon's wage controls have essentially achieved their goal of taming
the demands of the militant labor upsurge without a real fight having been mounted against them,
and the imperialist ruling class has succeeded in controlling both the dangerous revolutionary
offensive in Vietnam and the domestic anti-war movement. The American working class, despite
massive discontent with the coalition politics of the two capitalist parties and immense militancy on
economic questions over the past five years, is still lacking even the beginnings of an organized
movement for its own class political party.
The Democrats have harvested the rotten remains of the previous wasted era of petty-bourgeois
protest politics. The political heirs of those who "put their bodies on the line" against the war, to-
gether with the "heroes" of the Chicago conspiracy trial, have trooped back into the party of war they
demonstrated against in 1968. The reformist nationalists ofthe black movement have reaped what the
virulently independent "black power" radicalization sowed, and, with a few "separatist" provisos, are
Rouge, 11 March 1972
200,000 workers and students protest the murder of
Pierre Overney, at funeral march boycotted by the CP.
zation of the class has expanded. At the same time,
the traditional strongholds of militancy have been
somewhat reluctant to move toward large-scale
action. Nevertheless, the upsurge of marginal
sectors is indicative of the subjective readiness
of the class.
Fre.nch Economy Squeezed
In addition to the uneven working-class up-
surge, and feeding deCisively into working-class
militancy, the economic situation in France has
been applying substantial pressure on the bour-
geoisie. The fall of DeGaulle also meant the at-
tempt by the French bourgeoisie to renovate the
particularly antiquated structure of French capi-
tal. However, it has been largely unable to ac-
complish this goal. The successive "crises" of
continued on page 11
leading their followers as well back into the
Democratic "white power structure" in the finest
tradition of M. L. King. Standing at the door to
welcome the "radicals" back home is the newly-
r e - em erg e n t and growing Communist Party,
against whose "old left" politics so much "New
Left" venom was directed.
The McGovern Illusion
Like the phony "peace candidates" who ran in
Democratic primaries in the late sixties, "lesser
evil" McGnvern has rapidly vacated all his earlier
so-called "radical" pOSitions, "clarified" hispro-
capitalist essence and generally accommodated to
every section of the ruling class and bourgeois
power structure including Wall Street, Wallace,
the cops, Mayor Daley, New York's Wagner
(resurrected for the occasion), and all the old
Democratic Party machines. His direct sub-
servience to the Democratic machine, and through
it, to the ruling class, was demonstrated quite
clearly by the hilarious "Eagleton affair," in
which neither the will of the mass convention of
the "reformed" Democratic Party, nor the "pub-
lic opinion" expressed in the heavily pro-Eagleton
mail flow during the "affair" counted one whit
against the wishes of the big capitalist political
mouthpieces as to who could or could not be on
the ticket.
"Peace" candidate McGovern reveals his fun-
damentally pro-imperialist politics with his de-
fense of the use of troops if necessary to defend
Israel, i.e., U,S. interests in the Near East. The
single-issue movement against the Vietnam War
revealed the same fundamentally pro-imperialist
politics at the time of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli
War, when, in an orgy of Zionist and pro-Zionist
chauvinism, Vietnam doves became shrieking
hawks. The critical political difference between
then and now, enabling this "antiwar movement"
to move into a majority position in the Democratic
National Convention is the rise in bourgeois de-
!eatism--i.e., a tactical shift in ruling class
strategy-over the seemingly endless quagmire
in Vietnam.
Thus the 1972 election experience, incor-
porating such "miracles" as the ousting of the
Daley machine from the Democratic convention
(against the wishes of McGovern) while the rep-
resentatives of the very same victims of Daley's
cops comfortably take their seats, together with
drastically increased youth, female, Black, etc.,
representation thoroughly demonstrates the futil-
ity of attempts to reform the Democratic Party
or any capitalist party. Despite the change in
personnel, the same capitalist machines and big
continued on next page
SWP/WONAAC SINK IN
BOURGEOIS SWAMP
TOWARD A COMMUNIST WOMEN'S MOVEMENT!
Pages _
8-9 .
Lessons from the Bolshevik Struggle Against
Women's Oppression
2
Comic' Opera-tunists and
the General Strike
-A NOTE FOR THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS-
In an attempt to cover up their gross oppor-
tunism, the IS is quick to denounce as "sectar-
ian," by means of lies and slander, the principled
actions of revolutionary Marxists. An article on
the Labor for Peace Conference entitled "Comic
Opera Sectarians Denounce Rank and File Cau-
cus" in the August 1972 issue of Workers' Power
states, "The 'Spartacist League,' along with the
'Vanguard Newsletter' group, denounced the one-
day work stoppage proposal as reformist, and
demanded instead a 'general strike until the war
is over.' This demand has a militant sound
similar to a demand for the seizure of stat;
power. Such a slogan, however, is simply revolu-
tionary posturing "
The answer to this charge is simple-it's a
lie.
Not only does the IS completely ignore the
clear distinction between the demands of the VNL
and SL, but also, in order to cover up its own
opportunism, it purposefully obscures the prin-
cipled SL objection to the way in which the IS'
work-stoppage proposal was raised. Such behav-
ior is completely unacceptable for principled so-
cialists, but it is not much of a surprise coming
from the IS.
The Vanguard Newsletter proposal (or more
correctly, the proposal of the "Committee for
Rank and File Caucuses," an unprincipled amal-
gam of Harry Turner's VNL and the S o c i a l i ~
Forum group) does indeed call for building for
a "general strike of labor by organizing strike
committees in the shops to stop all production
and services until the war against the Indo-
chinese workers and peasants is ended " (from
"A Rank and File Program to End the War,"
emphasis ours). The Spartacist League demand
for "Strikes Against the War and the Wage Freeze"
is a proper transitional approach. As explained
in the text of the Workers Vanguard supplement
distributed at the conference, such strikes should
be seen as "leading up to a nationwide general
strike."
Trotsky on the General Strike
A polemic of Trotsky's- "The ILP and the
Fourth International" (September 1935}-dealt
with the question of the general strike. The cen-
trist ILP (Independent Labor Party) of Great
Britain, which broke from bourgeois pacifism only
half way towards a proletarian program and af-
filiation with the Fourth International, was in
many ways an ideological ancestor of the IS.
Trotsky, basing himself on Engels, criticized the
ILP's "radical phraseology" on the question of
"the general strike to stop war":
"The general strike is not only separated here
from the social revolution but also counterposed
to it as a specific method to 'stop war.' This is
an ancient conception of the anarchists which
life itself smashed long ago. A general strike
without a victorious insurrection cannot 'stop
war.' If, under the conditions of mobilization,
the insurrection is impOSSible, then so is a gener-
al strike impossible 0 the aim of revolutionary
policy should not be an isolated general strike,
as a special means to 'stop war, I but the prole-
tarian revolution into which a general strike will
enter as an inevitable or very probable integral
part. "
- Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1935-36
A general strike which is not immediately
successful by the threat alone must either be a
fiasco or lead directly to a revolutionary situa-
tion and the building of organs of dual power by
the proletariat. Therefore to call for a general
strike "until the war is over" is either meaning-
less utopian bombast or a willful attempt to de-
flect the revolutionary drive for power of the
proletariat.
It is no accident that the proposal of the
Vietnam Veterans Against the War, "Stop the
War With a General Strike," had an impatient,
pacifist tone, since to view the general strike
as a special means just to deal with war is
closely akin to viewing war, not capitalism,
as the central problem facing mankind. The
radical phraseology of the VNL (CRFC) pro-
posal is just one step away from the VVAW's
pacifist-utopianism.
The Spartacist League has always proposed
agitation for political strikes against the war
and combatted all opportunist excuses based on
assertions of the "premature" nature of this
slogan or of the subjective unreadiness of the
workers. During the heyday of petty-bourgeois
radicalism in the late 60's, we raised the demand
for "An Anti-war Friday" in order to split the
class-collaborationist anti-war movement in a
working-class political direction. Needless to
say, this proposal was "sectarian" to the IS,
which was just as opportunist then as it is now.
In 1967, the IS (then Independent Socialist Clubs)
supporters in the Bay Area chapter of Trade
Union SANE supported the U Thant proposals
for a general cease-fire and negotiations in
Vietnam, in order to remain on favorable terms
with the liberal bureaucrats in the leadership!
In order to clarify this matter more thoroughly,
we have sent the following letter to the IS:
International Socialists
c/o Workers' Power
Spartacist League
Box 1377 G.P .0.
New York, N.Y. 10001
21 August 1972
14131 Woodward Ave.
Highland Park, Mich. 48203
Comrades:
The Spartacist League categorically denies
the assertion printed in the August 1972 issue
of Workers' Power under the heading "Comic
Opera Sectarians Denounce Rank and File Cau-
cus" that our supporters at the Labor for Peace
Conference in St. LouiS, "along with the 'Van-
guard Newsletter' group, denounced the one-day
wo,rk stoppage proposal as reformist, and de-
manded instead a 'general strike until the war
is over.' "
This is a groundless lie manufactured out of
the whole cloth!
I} The SL did not object to the IS proposal
for a one-day work stoppage itself, but objected
vehemently and abstained on the opportunist at-
tempt to incorporate this proposal into an amend-
ment to the social-patriotic statement of policy
of the bureaucratic sponsors of the conference
(about which policy declaration the same issue
of Workers' Power had not a word of criticism).
2) Nowhere in the written or verbal propa-
ganda of the Spartacist League will you or any-
one find the formulation, "for a general strike
until the war is over."
This accusation has the same character as if
we "immoral" bolsheviks equated your position
on Vietnam with, say, the openly anti-communist
and social-patriotic views of the Socialist Party-
SDF, and then attributed the SP's pOSition to
you both.
We demand public retraction of your attribu-
tion of the Vanguard Newsletter position to us,
noting instead what our position is: "For Strikes
Against the War and the Wage Freeze" (from the
list of demands in the 22 June 1972 Workers
Vanguard Special Supplement, "Strike Against
the War-Build a Labor Party!" distributed at
the conference).
-Spartacist League
WORKERS VANGUARD
Continued from page 1
... Elections
money donors make the real decisions, the Demo-
crats in Congress vote with the same disregard
for the party "program," and the candidate is lust
as hypocritical as before and no more responsible
to his supporters. But even such examples of
futility as this attempt to reform the two-party
system from within will go on being repeated
until a workers' party is counterposed to
liberalism.
AFL-CIO Neutrality
The official "neutrality" of the AFL-CIO lead-
ership in the presidential elections, far from
being an actual break from capitalist party poli-
tics, simply reflects the defeat of Humphrey and
the old line labor-liberal machines in the na-
tional Democratic Party. Although it is a big
step in the rupture of the labor-liberal alliance,
which has been the backbone of the Democratic
Party since Roosevelt, a new realignment within
the framework of capitalist politics is still
possible. While sections of the labor bureaucracy
may at some time be forced into deepening this
rupture by forming a labor party, at this time
the aims of all wings are clearly the rebuilding
of a right-wing liberal, prO-labor-bureaucracy
faction in the Democratic Party and pressuring
McGovern by supporting local Democratic cam-
paigns only. Meanwhile, the more liberal wing of
the bureaucracy is jumping on the McGovern
bandwagon.
As usual, the "left" groups divide neatly along
the lines of the various sections of the labor
bureaucracy and capitalist class which they are
tailing after. The ideologues: of the old social-
democracy (Socialist Party-SDF /League for In-
dustrial Democracy) have been idolizing AFL-
CIO head Meany, and lost in pushing Boeing
Aircraft's Senator Jackson for President, but now
debate giving support for McGovern. The Com-
munist Party, Which unconditionally supports
McGovern, does so through orienting to the "pro-
gressive" wing of the bureaucracy, headed by
Woodcock of the UAW and Wurf of AFSCME. Al-
though nominally running its own campaign in the
elections, the CP, like the "progressive" bureau-
crats, sees McGovern as a clear "lesser evil"
and beating Nixon as the main task. This remains
unchanged despite the brief and belated admis-
sion by the Daily World that McGovern is "vac-
illating-even on the war" ("Send Nixon Pack-
ing-the People's Goal For November," 18 Au-
gust). Much fancy footwork is required in week
after week of Daily World articles to explain to
the "progressive" allies why the Communist
"campaign" does not actually threaten the anti-
Nixon front, and to the radicals in the CP' s youth
group, YWLL, and elsewhere why working inside
the two parties of capitalism is really part of the
same strategy as running independent Communist
candidates. Although the CP, which seems a bit
surprised at its own new-found viability, is re-
cruiting youth who in some sense want to be
"revolutionary," its basic political strategy of
aiding the "liberals" against the "reactionaries"
within the spectrum of capitalist politics has not
changed since it was instrumental in preventing
the development of a labor party and tying labor
to the Democrats under Roosevelt in the thirties
and forties.
"Workers" League Cretinism
On the other Side, orienting toward the more
conservative central core of the trade union bu-
reaucracy, stands the vastly smaller, more im-
potent and therefore more frenzied Workers
League of Tim Wohlforth, an ostenSibly "Trotsky-
ist" sect. While the CP excuses its role by ac-
cusing Meany and Abel of siding with Nixon "re-
action," the Workers League angrily accuses the
CP of "adapting" to the progressive wing of the
trade union bureaucracy and instead seeks to
"push" Meany and I. W. Abel of the SteelWorkers
into forming a labor party all the while denying
the right-wing pOlitical character of the central
AFL-CIO leadership. Thus theWL's opportunism,
which has been carefully nurtured over long years
of adapting to every conceivable element, includ-
ing cops, black nationalists and "progressive"
continued on next page
September 1972
WfJlillEIiS VANfilJAli1J
\lani!">1 \\ ol'king-Cla!">!">
l'uhli!">IH'd 1114' Sl'al'la('i!">1 Leaguc'
Editorial Board: Liz Gordon (chairman), Chris
Knox (managing editor), Karen Allen
(production manager).
Circulation manager: Anne Kelley.
West Coast editor: Mark Small.
New England editor: George Foster.
Subscription: $1 yearly (11 issues). Bundle rates
for 10 or more copies. Address: Box 1377, G.P.O.,
New York, N.Y. 10001. Telephone: WA 5-8234.
Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters
do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.
trade union bureaucrats, has now culminated in
uncritical pressure on George Meany himself,
the arch-reactionary and anti-communist who has
typ i fi e d and led the U.S. labor aristocracy
through one of its most conservative and wretch-
ed pro-imperialist phases, since the purges of
the McCarthy period.
The character of all trade union bureaucrats,
inc 1 u din g Meany, is contradictory: they are
simultaneously workers' leaders and agents of
the capitalist class within the labor movement.
While it is thus perfectly possible that some of
them may form a labor party out of desperation
if caught between implacable rank-and-file mili-
tancy and attack from all sectors of the capitalist
what Circumstances, under what guidance, and
for what purposes that party would be created."
-On the Labor Party Question
in America, 1932
Although this was written six years before
sky urged his U.S. supporters to take up the
slogan for a labor party, he insisted then that
it had to be fought for on the basis of the Tran-
sitional Program. Would the Workers League
support a "labor party" whose purpose was to
route the workers back into capitalist politics
by capturing the Wallace vote with racist dem-
agogy, running Henry Jackson for president, pre-
venting all wheat Shipments to the Soviet Union
and bombing North Vietnam back into the Stone
Age? Apparently, they WOUld.
But Trotskyists fight for a working-class pro-
gram and for a labor party, not for a reformist
labor party. The labor party demand is a tactic
for overcoming the huge gap between the objec-
tive need for organized working-class political
leadership and the relative weakness of the sub-
jectively revolutionary forces. It is not an objec-
tive historic necessity which the bureaucracy
will inevitably be forced to implement for the
workers. It does not stand above the real strug-
Guardian, 7 September 1968
1968: Anti-war protesters jeer National Guardsmen at demonstrations outside Democratic Party
Convention in Chicago.
class, it is inconceivable for them not to exhaust
all avenues of conciliation within capitalism first,
and then to think twice. The Meany bureaucracy
will not form a labor party, just as William
Green's AFL refused to organize industrial unions
in the thirties. A split would have to occur, with
some elements becoming convinced that they
must form a labor party in order to prevent
leadership of the workers from passing to the
communists. Such a conviction moved John L.
Lewis to form the CIO.
Program Is the Key
While it is true that a labor party is now a
tremendous defensive need of the trade unions
under conditions of the crisis and hostility of
the two bourgeois parties, enhancing the propa-
gandistic importance of the slogan, it cannot be
considered outside the context of its pyogram and
objective thrust. Meany and Abel have made clear
the raCist, pro-war and anti-communist program
they would push on the labor party the WL's
Bulletin says they are thinking about (17 July,
24 July). Yet the Bulletin completely refrains
from challenging them on it. Trotsky had a dif-
ferent orientation toward this problem:
3
gle to implement both it and a working class
program.
SWP Reformism
Unlike the CP and WL, the reformist Social-
ist Workers Party has been left out in the cold by
the departure of its erstwhile reformist allies to
the Democratic Party. Indeed these feminist,
black nationalist and anti-war reformists from
the SWP's various single-issue fronts are the
"new face" of the Democratic Party. Completely
caught in its own trap, the SWP has based its
whole pro g ram on building petty-bourgeois,
single-issue protest movements which are "ac-
ceptable to capitalist politicians" and which
(sometimes forcibly) "exclude revolutionaries,"
yet now hypocritically accuses the CP electoral
coalition of these sins! (Militant, 21 April 1972).
The SWP thinks of its "independent" pressure
movements as having demands which "cannot be
achieved within the capitalist system," yet they
are at a loss to explain why virtually all the lead-
ers of the single-issue abortion repeal, peace
and nationalist-reformist movements are now
quite comfortably pushing their "demands" from
within the two-party system.
The SWP presidential campaign is unsupport-
able because, while it also mentions alaborparty
and is not now directly acting as apressure group
within the formal bourgeois political framework,
it is nevertheless completely subordinated to re-
formist, single-issue protest politics-"a self-
determination for everyone" line empty of class
content, Le., profoundly petty-bourgeois. Nowheye
does the SWP intervene to struggle for a working-
class orientation or program for these move-
ments. It is thus quite natural that, lacking a
unifying working-class perspective, these move-
ments "unify" as isolated pressure groups within
Democratic P arty capitalist politics. Although
this tendency has had a tremendous erosion effect
on the SWP' s mass arenas and slowed its growth
rate, both of which were built up during the hey-
day of petty-bourgeois protest politics in the late
sixties, the party shows no signs of searching
through the Trotsky in its closet for the answers.
Build a Movement for a Labor Party
The only course open to socialist and labor
militants in the 1972 election is to work for the
creation of an organized movement for a labor
party in the trade unions, based on militant cau-
cuses and the transitional program. The struggle
for an independent party of labor, while it may
recruit some trade union leaders, must be based
on a rank-and-file movement to replace the re-
formist bureaucracy with a revolutionary leader-
ship, since it is this bureaucracy which main-
tains capitalist politics in the unions. An impor-
tant par t of this groundwork will be lo cal
campaigns run by the trade unions with their own
candidates and calling for a break with all cap-
italist politiCians and for a nationwide movement
for a labor party. This call must be based on a
working-class political program, including break-
ing state wage controls, defending the Viet-
namese Revolution in the context of general op-
position to American imperialism, workers' con-
trol of industry and a workers' government._
AssocIated Press
"1 will never aSSume the responsibility to affirm
abstractly and dogmatically that the creation of a
'labor party' would be a 'progressive step' even
in the United States because 1 do not know under
1972: Safely co-opted anti-war forces cheer McGr:;vern inside Democratic Party Convention in Miami.
; . '. ! , I
4 WORKERS VANGUARD
Postal Workers Sold Out
by CWA Merger Move
NEW ORLEANS-The leadership
of the American Postal Workers
Union (APWU) rammed a resolution
through its national convention here
authorizing itself to enter merger
negotiations with the Communication
Workers of America (CWA). By
their haste to align themselves with
the CW A bureaucracy, the APWU
leadership indicates its growing
anxiety about the possibility of rank-
and-file revolts against union com-
plicity with the attacks on postal
workers' conditions being made as
part of Nixon's plan to reorganize
the Post Office.
While delegates suspicious of
the merger proposal were gathering
at all the microphones, and before
amendments to the resolution were
even voted on, President Francis S.
Filbey accepted a motion to move
the previous question and declared
all debate out of order. In the re-
sulting parliamentary con f us ion,
Filbey ruled that the merger resolu-
tion had passed and quickly adjourn-
ed the session. The way is now
clear for the amalgamation of the
300,000-member APWU with the
CWA (550,000 members), since the
latter passed a surprise motion for
the merger at its convention last
June (see WV No. 10).
Bureaucratic Unity
The APWU and CW A bureaucra-
cies are not interested in increasing
the workers' strength through trade
union unity, but in providing them-
selves with a larger and more in-
vulnerable bureaucratic structure
from which to defy the increasingly
rebellious membership of both
unions. Although historically the
role of splitting the unions has of-
ten fallen to reformist bureaucra-
cies which desire to break up large,
powerful combinations of militant
workers, unity is not an end in it-
self which can be approached un-
conditionally, without consideration
of its purpose. As in the recent
abortive proposal for unity of the
ILA with the ILWU, followed by
ILWU-Teamster unity moves (WV
No.6) the need of the workers for
unity in the struggle against their
oppressors is not served by the
"unity" of bureaucrats who are look-
ing for another gimmick to betray
that struggle.
Postal workers face a crisis as
the Postal Service ruthlessly pro-
ceeds with its plan of a 25% reduc-
tion in the work force. Early re-
tirement and a hiring freeze policy
have been used in an attempt to get
around no-lay-off provisions in the
national contract. To further weak-
en the union, the Postal Service has
begun hiring temporary, non-union
casuals to fill job openings former-
ly held by union members. Never
considering strike action, the APWU
leadership's only response has been
to meekly submit the grievances to
arbitration.
Considerable dissatisfaction was
manifested on the convention floor.
A proposed per capita tax boost was
overwhelmingly de f eat e d amidst
general criticism of the union lead-
ership. Resolutions for a labor par-
ty and boycotting of war industries
were offered by a radical represen-
tative of a small local in California.
In general, the California del ega-
tion seemed most consistently in
opposition to the APWU leadership.
On several occasions rulings of
the chair were overruled by massive
standing votes of the del ega t e s.
S eve r a I times proceedings were
briefly held up by jeering and boo-
ing directed against President Fil-
bey, The positions of the leaders
were secure, however, since they
had been safely elected ahead of
time through a mail ballot
referendum!
This is a typical example of the
use of the referendum in unionpoli-
tics, and it should be a lesson to
the United National Caucus, a small
group of radicals in the UAW who
want to see the officers of that
union elected by referendum in or-
der to improve democracy. No mat-
ter how tightly controlled the con-
ventions are now, they are bound to
be more so if the bureaucracy is
secure from the threat of being
tossed out of office by the dele-
gates. The real decision.'3, and es-
pecially changes, are necessarily
made at delegated conventions where
debate is possible, not in the in-
evitably leadership-controlled ref-
erendums. It is a complete denial
of democracy if a leadership which
does not reflect the will of a con-
vention can continue in office, as
happened in the UAW in 1944 on the
key issue of the World War II no-
strike pledge.
Delegates to Postal Workers Convention in New Orleans hold mass picket in solidarity
with striking clothing workers.
There was virtually no discus-
sion of political issues such as the
war in Vietnam, racial discrimina-
tion or the oppression of women.
However, hundreds of delegates did
respond enthusiastically to an appeal
for solidarity from the Amalgamat-
ed Clothing Workers, which is strik-
ing Farah Company. Del ega t e s
formed a massive picket line in
front of New Orleans' largest de-
partment stores, urging a boycott of
Farah pants.
Spartacist League was the only
organized political tendency visibly
in attendance at the conference.
Workers Vanguard sold very well.
All political discussion was gear-
ed to harnessing the postal workers
to the capitalist two-party system,
with the convention ultimately en-
dorsing McGovern. Filbey and his
lieutenants spoke constantly about
depending on "our friends" among
the capitalist politicians. No opposi-
tion voice was ralsed to point out
that while Filbey and his gang may
indeed be friends with the bosses'
rep res en t a ti v e s, the masses of
workers can expect no favors from
their class enemies.
Discontented forces at the APWU
convention were fragmented and un-
coordinated. The for mat ion of a
militant caucus is needed to give
principled leadership to these forc-
es, to expose the class-collabora-
tionist role of the union bureaucra-
cy, and to provide an analysis of
the capitalist state. To make a break
from the economist trade unionism
which inevitably recreates bureauc-
racy, these political points must be
FINAL REPORT IN -
SUB DRIVE SUCCESS
The final results of the Workers Van-
guard subscription drive are in. Not only
was the drive a success with 601 one-
year subs being sold, but 200 subs to the
Revolutionary Communist Youth's News-
letter were taken out at the same time.
And the subs sold are of clear-cut political
value. The great bulk are going to people
who are in the process of being drawn
closer to our aims and involvement in our
activity, especially young workers, radical
students and other militants.
The Boston comrades did well in the
drive and plan to resume a local sub cam-
paign this Fall as well. Chicago made the
poorest showing, being overtaken by in-
dustrial responsibilities part way through
the drive. Of the smaller areas Washington
D.C. and New Orleans also made a good
showing, the latter on a well organized
basis.
Among individual comrades, Keith of
Los Angeles sold the most with 311/2
points- WV subs counting a full pOint and
RCY Newsletter subs a half point each.
The runner-up was Bruce of New York with
231/2 pOints. At the forthcoming Sparta-
cist League National Conference the win-
ner will be presented with his choice from
among several recently published, hard-
cover Marxist classics.
In the midst of much other demanding
work, SL and RCY members as well as
other Workers Vanguard supporters did a
vitally necessary job in this sub drive.
With the steady expansion of the SL and
our widening involvement in political and
social struggle, we increasingly feel the
need for and look toward publishing Work-
ers Vanguard every two weeks. The con-
tinued broadening of the paper's regular
circulation base is a necessary step to
this increased frequency.
Area
~
Sold
Berkeley -Oakland 55 56
Boston 125 139
Chicago 40 18
Los Angeles 50 52
New Orleans 15 19
New York 160 160
San Francisco 25 25
San Diego 10 6
Stony Brook 10 6
Washington, D.C. 10 25
At-Large
~ ~
600 601
the core of the caucus program,
incorporated a s demands for un-
conditional 0 p p 0 sit ion to Nixon's
pr iva t i z at io n schemes and wor-
kers control of the Post Office, de-
fense of the Vietnamese Revolution
in the context of general opposition
to American imperialism, against
all capitalist politicians and for a
labor party based on the trade unions
and a workers' government. Such a
caucus would also fight for a sharp
reduction in the work week with no
loss in pay and new hiring to re-
place management's slashing of the
work force; the closed shop and union
control of hiring throughout the Post
Office; an end to the referendum
elections in the union and opposition
to the phony merger. Thus armed
with the transitional program, such
a caucus could lead the workers to
an understanding that their problems
ultimately can be solved only by
overthrowing the entire system of
capitalist wage slavery
Lastchance 1
at this &;
pI'icel
11 ISSUES
INCLUDES SPARTACIST
Name ________________________ __
Address _______ _
City __ _
State __ _ __ Zip ____ _
WfJRKERS "ANGUARII
Make checks payable / maO to:
Spartacist/ Box 1377, C.p.O./New York/N.Y. 10001
September 1972
SWP Opens
Door for
McGovern
LOS ANGELES-The "Emergency Anti-war
Convention" (21-23 July) of the National Peace
Action Coalition (NP AC) made clear that the popu-
lar front eagerly built by the Socialist Workers
Party (SWP) is now being funneled directly into
the Democratic Party, The fruit of the SWP's
"independent" anti-war movement is an army of
non-class-conscious youth for McGovern,
Bourgeois Defeatism
It was only a year ago that the SW'P sealed in
blood alliance with the ruling class by violently
expe1lll1g members of the Spartacist League/
Revolutionary Communist Youth and Progressive
Labor/SDS for protesting the presence of Demo-
Senator Hartke and vigorously jeering red-
baIter UAW bureaucrat Victor Reuther at the July
1971 NP AC Convention, Since that time the
SWP /NP AC pop front has blossomed considerably
in "respectability" as a result of a wave of bour-
geois defeatism which swept the U.S, after the
North Vietnamese offensive of March-April 1972.
It was this wave of bourgeois defeatism andpaci-
fism which suddenly boosted McGovern into the
national spotlight and Democratic nomination,
While he is no more apacifist than Richard Nixon,
McGovern represents the more far-sirrhted
imperialists who see the possibility
,:1 makmg peace and maintaining imperialist
ll1fluence in Asia through a deal with the Stalinists
such as the 1954 Geneva accords, It is precisely
because of the threat of this kind of "peace" that
must fight for military victory
to the NLF! DRV and a communist Indochina!
In spite of Nixon's diplomatic successes in
P eking and Moscow, which allowed him to blockade
North Vietnam with impunity, he has not succeeded
in ending the war, and this continues to feed the
split in the ruling class and hence the McGovern
forces, McGovern is further buttressed by the
class-collaborationist Stalinists in Hanoi, who
have subordinated their military campaigns to the
Moscow and Peking bureaucracies and the bour-
geois U ,S, peace movement, thereby throwing
away the opportunity which existed in April-
May to thoroughly destroy the panicked Thieu
forces and come to power. The DRV /NLF still
seeks a coalition government, minus only Thieu
instead of a communist revolution. '
SWP's Anti-war
The NP AC pop front has picked up much sup-
port from "big names" in the Democratic Party
and trade union bureaucracy as a result of bour-
geoiS defeatism, thus fulfilling the SWP's concept
of "success" for the anti-war movement: a
coalition of working-class and bourgeois forces
under a bourgeois program. The Militant (14
July) boasted, for instance, that the NP AC Con-
vention was endorsed by California State Senate
majority leader George Moscone, among others,
The NP AC national steering committee includes
Bronx Borough President Robert Abrams, Team-
ster vice-president Harold Gibbons, Senator
Vance Hartke, Brigadier General Hugh B, Hester,
Betty Friedan of NOW, Sanford Gottlieb of SANE
and leading representatives of Business
tives Move for Peace, College Young Democratic
Clubs and youth for McGovern,
!?uring the opening night rally on 21 July,
chaIrman John T. Williams of the Teamsters
interspersed the speakers with telegrams of sup-
port from "distinguished" Democrats, including
McGovern, Moscone and Alan Cranston. The
McGovern telegram read in part, "Through the
strength which COmes from united work and con-
cern we will end the senseless loss of human
lives and stop this tragic war," No doubt McGov-
ern appreciates the "united work" of the ex-
Trotskyist SWP during the election period!
The rally featured Bobby Seale of the Black
Panther Party (BPP), which recently endorsed
NP AC, This fits well in the BPP's jump into
reformism, including turns toward the black
church, black capitalism, and Democrats such as
Shirley Chisholm,
The split in the ruling class over tactics in
Indochina has its reflection in the trade union
bureaucracy as well, Thus NP AC has collected
endorsements from some of the liberal bureau-
crats, and another featured speaker was Harold
Gibbons, a Teamster vice-president who opposes
Teamster President FitZSimmons' endorsement
of Nixon only because he is pro-Democratic,
SL/RCY: The Only
Communist Opposition
The decisive political battles took place on
Saturday, 22 July, There were ten resolutions
representing virtually every tendency on the left
(except for the Communist Party which main-
tains its own pop front, the PCPJ,' which refused
to back this convention for the stated reason
that NP AC is "racist" for not endorSing the
P RG 7 -point peace plan), It is a devastating fact
that except for the SL/RCY, virtually the entire
American left has been swept into the NP AC
and PCPJ pop fronts, The SL/RCY alone called
for smashing NP AC through the expulsion of the
bourgeoisie from the anti-war movement and ,
was thus the only prinCipled communist opposition
at the conference, in addition to being the only
Significant opposition force beSides the pro-
McGovern wing,
The SL/RCY leaflet "Smash the Pop Front! "
detailed the collusion of the Workers League,
International Socialists, National Caucus of Labor
Committees and others in the construction of
the S WP' s class-collaborationist coalition. The
leaflet ended with a six-point proposal:
1, For the unconditional exclusion of the bour-
geOisie and their pOlitical representatives
from the anti-war movement!
2. For the immediate and unconditional with-
drawal of all U ,S, forces from Indochina!
For unconditional military support and vic-
tory for the DRV!NLF: All Indochina must
go communist!
3, Labor strikes against the war and against
the freeze!
4. Control prices not wages, Union misleaders
stay off the Pay Board:
5. Fight economic protectionism! For inter-
national working-class solidarity!
6. For a labor party based on the trade unions!
The "Left" Tail of NPAC
A,ll the other resolutions were attempts to
modIfy the course of NP AC without raising the
question of the presence of the bourgeoisie
thereby reflecting the deepening entrenchment of
the "left" groups in NPAC. The Workers League
(WL), which openly endorsed the NP AC expulsion
of communists a year ago, introduced a resolu-
tion calling on NP AC to "demand" that "the
American labor movement" .immediately call a
Congress of Labor for the purpose of launching
an independent labor party for the 1972 elec-
tion,., "
The WL intervention lacked the fulsome de-
nunciations of Stalinism which have filled their
previous resolutions to the pop front, and was
generally more subdued than ever so as not to
upset their new-found coziness with the SWP
which they call on workers to vote for in
ve:nber "as a critical part of breaking the trade
umons and the entire working class from the two
capitalist parties" (Bulletin, 17 January 1972).
Only about six WL supporters intervened and
they gave only one half-hearted speech for 'their
resolution in the plenary,
Progressive Labor/SDS, which late last year
dropped its previous correct criticism of class
collaboration in order to enter and endorse
NPAC, presented a pitifully low-level resolu-
tion, "Stop Genocide," which urged that "this
convention resolve that any or-
ganized by NP AC will stress the racist and
genocidal nature of the war in Vietnam." The
resolution also asked endorsement for the '!anti-
racism bill," a piece of reformism which SDS
tried to get the Democratic Party in Miami to
accept as part of its program! It includes such
items as imprisonment of any policeman "who
assaults a minority person, except in provable
Needless to say, the capitalist
polIce always carry out their crimes in "self-
defense." That is precisely why Lenin talked
the necessity of dismantling the capi-
talIst state, not reforming it.
5
PL Sells Out to McGovern
PL is attempting to build a mini-pop front
modelled after NP AC, and is trying to recruit
some of the liberals which NP AC and McGovern
have swept in, The latest issue of New Left
Notes (26 June), circulated at the convention
contains "Two Views On McGovern," The first
view states that McGovern "is worth voting for,
whether as a lesser of two evils or as a positive
force for change in America." The other view
ends by stating, "we should either vote for Mc-
Govern or not vote at alL" Outside of the un-
readable Challenge, PL has nothing to offer in
SDS and NP AC but" ,McGovern!
The International Socialists (IS), who have
attempted to operate as a "left" caucus in NP AC
without demanding the expulsion of the bour-
geoiSie, joined with the rabidly anti-communist
"N ews and Letters" group to form an "Anti-
War Coalition." This coalition submitted a reso-
called "Freeze the War, Free the People,"
WhICh left the door open for third bourgeois
parties such as the unmourned Peace and Free-
dom Party, and backed away from demandinrr
military victory to the DRV /NLF. A
IS leaflet was distributed which did state "we
the military victory of the NLFiPRC
agaznst U.S. imperialism" (emphasis in origina] i J
but as usual, what the IS formally called for ill
its own name and what it actually pushed for U:l
the floor were two different things. Being extreme
left-wing social-democrats and fundamentaL\'
anti-communist, the IS began dropping the "mili-
tary victory" slogan in March-April when it
looked as if the North Vietnamese offensive was
succeeding (see WV No, 8). Now that the North
Vietnamese have been beaten back, the IS again
occasionally raises the idea, But by refu;ing
to call on the Soviet Union to break the block- '
ade, the IS back-handedly accepts the U.S, block-
ade of North Vietnam and renders meaningless
the slogan for military victory.
The National Caucus of Labor Committees
(NCLC) submitted their "Working Class Alterna-
tives in the Election Year," which they presented
to the SMC last February (see WV No.7), but
now with a new supplemental leaflet attached. 'nle
supplement made clear again that NCLC appro\ i_'S
of the SWP' s pop-front strategy and merely c'p-
poses the embarraSSing fact in particular cases
of open Democratic candidates like McGovpl'n
coming into it. As a solution to the embarrass-
ment which the SWP faces, NCLC proposed that
NP AC negotiate with the SWP to "modify" the
JenneSS/Pulley (SWP) campaign program so that
N,CLC endorse it the sake of the prin-
, clple of ll1dependent workll1g-classpolitical ac-
tion '." In effect, the NCLC asked the SWP to
negotiate with itself, This is intended to create the
facade of a "principled" NP AC united front ap-
proach to the elections, but, as is well known to
the SWP, the NCLC is already committed to the
unmodifiable NP AC pop front, Michael Tinckler
of Philadelphia NCLC sits on the NP AC Steering
Committee.
McGovernites Come to Collect
on NPAC's "Independence"
Despite the million-and-one tie s between
NPAC and the Democratic Party, the SWP main-
tains the fiction that NP AC is "independent" so
that the SWP can hang onto a figment of radical-
ism, The McGovern forces came to the conven-
tion to collect on the real meaning of NP AC
"independence" by making more formal the con-
nection between NP AC and the Democrats, A
resolution was circulated early in the convention
calling for the explicit endorsement of McGovern
and u r gin g NP AC to work for McGovern's
election,
As we have conSistently pointed out since the
SWP launched its single-issue anti-war move-
ment in 1965, there can be no "independence"
froI? ,the bourgeoisie without a revolutionary
SOCIalIst program based on the working class;
but such a program was conSistently suppressed
by the SWP because it is "divisive" that is l't
d
' ' ,
rIves away the bourgeoisie!
Thus throughout Saturday, the SWP had to fight
on two flanks: feverishly attempting to beat off
the McGovern forces on formal endorsement and
at the same time having to answer SL/RCY
attacks with gloating statements about the "suc-
cess" of NP AC. It became clear in workshop
straw votes and in the evening plenary that the
McGovern forces did not have the votes to push
through their resolution, so they began a retreat
by stages, SWP leaders prevented their own
followers from cutting off discussion, so that the
continued on page 10
6 WORKERS VANGUARD
"TROTSKYIST" LONELY HEARTS CLUB
What Is VANGUARD NEWSLETTER?
In the July-August issue of Vanguard News-
letter (VN L) there appears a letter from the
"Committee for Rank and File Caucuses" (CRFC)
challenging the Spartacist League to publicly de-
fend our statement that VNL/CRFC leader David
Fender called the cops to open up the "public"
Workers League forum at the St. Louis Labor
for Peace Conference. The CRFC letter charged
the SL with a deliberate "misrepresentation of
fact" and challenged us to a "public forum" to
debate the incident in question. This is the first
time in the SL's eight-year history as a tendency
that the accuracy and integrity of our press-
despite its highly polemical, frank and revealing
character-has been so challenged. We accept
the CRFC's challenge and are prepared to con-
front the CRFC before any body in the socialist
and working-class movement. We want to make
known throughout the socialist and labor move-
ment that this erstwhile proletarian revolutionist,
David Fender, called upon the class enemy to
decide a struggle within the workers' movement.
CRFC and WL Vie for United Front
with the Cops
The material to which the CRFC letter objects
is two sentences in a leaflet titled "CP /TUAD
Prepares Betrayal with Mass Exclusion!" The
leaflet stated, " at the Labor for Peace Con-
ference last week the Stalinophobic WL cowardly
excluded all other tendencies from their allegedly
'public' meeting. Demonstrating further non-
proletarian means of struggle, and a complete
misunderstanding of the Leninist theory of the
state, the WL and CRFC called the cops on each
other, the WL to guard their meeting, the CRFC
to open it up." The next paragraph, also quoted
in the CRFC letter, went on to explain why the
working-class movement must not seek to "use
the capitalist cops or courts to enforce 'democ-
racy' within the labor movement."
At the Labor for Peace Conference in St.
Louis, the Workers League had called a forum at
St. Louis University sponsored in the name of a
UAW "rank and file" caucus. The meeting was
publicly advertised but the WL followed its by now
standard practice of physically excluding opponent
tendencies from the "public" meeting. Those
excluded were standing outside the barred meeting
room, including supporters of the International
Socialists, Socialist Workers Party, CRFC and
five supporters of the Spartacist League. Fender
announced, "I'm going to get us into this meet-
ing," and left the meeting room area. Then ac-
cording to the CRFC's version, Fender went to
dispute a WLer over the question of exclusion
before a campus administrator and in the pres-
ence of security guards. On returning to the meet-
ing room area, Fender stated that he had "coun-
tered" the WL's arguments. He had indeed!
Shortly after that, the campus administrator
accompanied by an armed guard approached the
WL leadership and informed them that exclusionist
meetings were against the rules. Fender stood
right behind the administrator and guard, eager
to enter the now opened meeting. All the other
groups present were likewise prepared to attend
the WL forum under campus cop auspices, except
for the Spartacist comrades who argued heatedly
against use of campus cops as arbitrators; one
ISer called our comrades "purists" for our posi-
tion that we would not touch such a meeting with
a ten-foot pole. The WL then transferred the
meeting to a private apartment.
The CRFC's letter is a smokescreen by crucial
omission. It piously protests, "The position of
the CRFC and its component organizations on
the question of the police and bourgeois legal in-
terference in the workers' movement is the same
as that of the SL." The letter claims that Fender
protested to the campus administration only to
prevent the guards throwing the CRFC out of the
building. This claim is given the lie by the facts,
which the letter conceals. The supposedly unin-
tended result of Fender's protest was the inter-
vention by the administrator and campus cop to
force the WL to open the forum. If this had not
been precisely the result which Fender was
seeking, wouldn't he of course have joined the
Spartacist supporters in refusing to enter the
meeting? But Fender and Jim Hays of CRFC/
VNL followed along behind the administration's
armed guard to enter the meeting!
Origins of the Turner "Tendency"
The lengthy and hysterical (and frequently
totally fabricated) attacks On the SL in recent
issues of VNL, and the demand for a cOnfron-
tation over the St. Louis incident, require us to
introduce working-class militants to the VNL
grouping and its history. VNL was launched by
one Harry Turner following his departure, along
with one supporter (his long-time friend Hugh
Fredricks), from the Spartacist League after
involvement in a faction fight in the SL in 1968.
In 1968 a liquidationist opposition arose in the
SL, based on a retreat from Trotskyism in favor
of a workerist impulse. Despite Turner's self-
inflating claims to be the leader ofthat opposition,
its real leader was Kay Ellens, who built a
thinly-veiled semi-syndicalist faction, sucked in
Turner, and then split with nine people without
even informing Turner and his lone supporter.
The immediate issue in the faction fight was
the fate of the SL's early efforts to build a tran-
sitional organization, the Militant Labor Civil
Rights Committee, designed to fight the special
oppression of black workers. Turner and other
members of the incipient minority, including
Ellens, had been involved in directing the MLCRC
efforts, and decided to concentrate on a mass
leafletting campaign directed at the NYC hospital
workers' union, where the SL had two comrades.
The MLCRC was not a special project for some
people to "do their own thing," but was treated
as an SL activity; virtually without exception every
member of the New York local distributedMLCRC
leaflets one or two mornings a week in front of
selected hospitals. When the two hospital workers
defected from the SL in the direction of anarcho-
Maoist street confrontationism (along with one
Bob Ross, now a component of the CRFC!), the
MLCRC's activities became a sterile exercise in
empty propagandism unsupported by an SL fraction
in the union. The Ellens-Turner opposition in-
sisted the work was still viable, counterposing
fake agitation to the SL's perspective of direct
political confrontation with other working-class
currents designed to cohere the most conscious
vanguard elements around Trotskyism. In par-
ticular, the kin d of agitation advocated by
Ellens-Turner deliberately avoided attacks on
black nationalist ideology then dominant among
black radicals and reflected in a definite mood
among the black masses. The minority repeatedly
insisted that the indefinite continuation of MLCRC,
despite the loss of any party fraction in the union,
had great possibilities, and that to discontinue it
meant the abandonment of any perspective for
recruiting black workers.
Ellens seized on the MLCRC as a good issue
for building her s e m i-syndicalist faction, pull-
ing in Turner On the basis of his impatience
and his subjective stake in MLCRC, which he
believed was the manifestation in the flesh of a
"Memorandum on the Negro Struggle" he had
written a year before. Spokesmen for the SL
majority repeatedly charged Turner with being in
a rotten bloc with Ellens in a faction whose real
politics were workerism, clandestinity, accom-
modation to black nationalism and emulation of
the Voix group in France, and which
had an immediate split perspective. Turner in-
sisted that he was the leader of the faction,
that it adhered to the basic orientation and pro-
gram of the SL, and that it did not have a split
perspective. Immediately thereafter, the nine
members of the Ellens faction preCipitously split
from the SL, without even informing Turner, to
carry out its workerist program. The grouping
promptly moved to a Midwest industrial center
and went underground to attempt to conquer the
proletarian masses, adopting political pOSitions
appropriate to its former minorityite stance:
advocacy of strike-breaking in the NYC teachers'
union strike in the name of "community control"
and characterization of the defomed workers'
states as state capitalist. Turner and his sup-
porter found themselves unceremoniously dumped
by the faction which Turner was supposedly lead-
ing! Turner declared himself the "real" minority
and the other nine "frictional losses." Complete-
ly discredited by the confirmation of the majori-
ty's characterization of his rotten bloc with a
semi-syndicalist faction, Turner got himself
suspended, then resigned from the SL.
The political "evolution" of Turn-
er can be directly traced to this experience.
Pushed into factional opposition in the SL by
impatience, grotesquely used and discarded by
Ellens as a figurehead for a syndicalist split-
oriented faction, feeling trapped in the SL and
then all alone outside it, Turner's whole sub-
sequent course has been a series of sordid at-
tempts to find some "political " basis-any basis-
to justify his factional maneuverings in and
ignominiOUS departure from the SL.
Turner Looks for a Home
After leaving the SL, Turner cast about look-
ing for something to join. His first impulse was
to re-unite with the Ellens group. But knowing
that Turner would never give up his comfort-
able life situation to enter a factory, Ellens
rejected his overtures. FuriOUS, he responded with
an "open letter" to the Ellens group (29 Novem-
ber 1968):
"We have been aware for Some time of Kay's
lack of scruple, of candor-speaking plainly of
downright dishonesty. We can quote you chapter
and verse . such as the crude falsehoods retailed
at local meetings "
Having unintentionally admitted previously cover-
ing up for his co-factionalist's lies, Turner went
on to denounce Ellens' "fetishistic attitude toward
recruiting through accretion at the factory level"
and her undergroundist orientation-as the SL
Majority had insisted all along! Of his own per-
spectives he wrote, "You patronizingly inform us
that our initial and tentative consideration of pre-
liminary involvement in a loose gathering of
radicals to try to win some addtional cadre
'merely postpones the real tasks' . "
After being rejected by Ellens, Turner and
his supporter joined the Labor Committee of L.
Marcus. Recall that the two main elements of
Turner's opposition were overwhelming organiza-
tional concentration on the labor movement and
single-minded agitation around the oppression of
black workers. The Labor Committee, however,
explicitly maintains the elitist position that aca-
demically trained intellectuals can conquer the
working class without implantation in industry
and trade union work; moreover, the LC re-
gards the black movement as simply divisive of
working-class unity and opposes in prinCiple the
raiSing of programmatic demands against the
special oppreSSion of blacks. While Turner was
in the LC, one of its leaders attacked the anar-
cho-Maoist wing of SDS in an article in the press
of the pro-war Socialist Party at a time when
the instruments of bourgeois public opinion were
waging a hysterical campaign against SDS. When
SLers attended an LC meeting to raise a motion
condemning the LC for this action, Turner ab-
stained. Turner's conduct in the LC was deter-
mined by a deSire to get close to the Workers
League, which Turner had already begun chasing,
and which had a fraction in the LC. .
Grovelling Leiter to Healy
Despite his comic-opera overtures to Ellens
and Marcus, Turner saw his main chance in
Gerry Healy's International Committee and its
American group, the Workers League of Tim
Wohlforth. While in the SL, Turner had written
savage denunciations of Healy's "International"
and the WL. Following the expulsion of the Spar-
tacist delegation from the 1966 IC conference,
Turner had written (letter to Healy, 30 April
1966): "You wanted an international after the man-
ner of Stalin's Comintern, permeated with servility
at one pole and authoritarianism on the other."
Referring to the economist program of the
Workers League's short-lived front group, Trade
Unionists for a Labor Party, which deliberately
omitted any mention of the fight against racial
oppreSSion (as well as opposition to the Vietnam
continued on next page
September 1972
war), Turner had denounced the WL for making
"a 'left' adaptation to the prevailing white chau-
vinism in the working class" ("Whither the Spar-
tacist League," 7 July 1968).
But only a few months after leaving the SL,
Turner was chasing Healy and the WL! On
10 January 1969 Turner sent a classic letter of
recantation to Healy in which he capitulated on
virtually every point. He wrote:
"Why wasn't r able to see it Ithat the Spartacist
tendency was "apetty-bourgeois personality cult" J
at the time? Why was r originally drawn to
Robertson's group, and away froni Wohlforth and
Mueller in 1963? Subjective factors playa large
part in behavior, of course . r tended to react
in simple Pavlovian fashion to your intervention
in the RT . r also reacted quite superficially,
empirically and parochially. "
In his desire to become a Healyite, Turner
. denounced the SL pOSition against the Chinese
"Cultural R evolution," reverting to his original
support for the Maoist Red Guards, and stated
only the mildest of criticisms of the WL's
genuine adaptation to white chauvinism:
"As to the Negro question, the WL's program ...
is one which we can support. Howe\'er we feel that
the program does not sufficiently orientate toward
the increasingly militant black workers .... "
On his new-found commitment to the WL, he
wrote: "when we examine the WL, we find a
performance in keeping with its professed de-
sire to build a Leninist party in the U.S. "!
Despite Turner's fulsome grovelling, Healy
insisted on thoroughly demeaning his former
opponent by demanding that Turner give up his
position on the black question and fully embrace
the WL's position. Turner turned away from the
WL, although without giving up hopes for an
eventual r e con c iIi at ion with international
Healyism.
The black question continued to be a stumbling
block for Turner. While in the SL Turner claimed
agreement with the SL position that U.S. blacks
are a doubly oppressed color caste, but not long
after leaving (VNL, November 1969) he caved in to
black nationalist sentiment:
"Should the mass of the Black people, the vast
majority of which is working class, decide on
nationhood, reach the' conclusion that they can
no longer reside in the same national state with
whites, and demand a section of the U.S. for a
separate state, we would support their
demand . "
This position has nothing whatsoever in common
with Leninism. For a Leninist, the question of
whether a group is a nation is not determined by
how much its members want to secede but by
the existence of a separate political economy in
embryo within the oppressor nation. In a frenzy of
white guilt, Turner entirely does away with the
Leninist criteria in order to assure black nation-
alists that if they really want to be a nation, he
will certainly give them permission. If TUrner
believes that U.S. black people possess the ob-
jective requirements for becoming an independent
national state, then his position is simply patron-
izing; for a nation, self-determination is a right
which Leninists must unconditionally support, not
SPARTACIST
LOCAL DIRECTORY
ATLANTA
Box 7686, Atlanta, GA 30309
BERKELEY-OAKLAND ........ ,. (415) 848-3029
Box 852, Main P.O., Berkeley, CA 94701
BOSTON ...................... (617) 876-1787
Box 188, M.I.T. Sta., Cambridge, MA 02139
CHICAGO ..................... (312) 643-4394
Box 6471, Main P.O., Chicago, I L 60680
EUREKA
Box 3061, Eureka, CA 95501
HOUSTON (contact New York)
LOS ANGELES ............. , ... (213) 467-6855
Box 38053, Wilcox Sta., Los Angeles, CA 90038
NEW ORLEANS ......... , ...... (504) 866-8384
Box 51634, Main P.O., New Orleans, LA 70151
NEW YORK .................... (212) 925-2426
Box 1377, G.P.O., New York, NY 10001
SAN DIEGO .................... (714) 453-1436
Box 22052, Univ. City Sta., San Diego, CA 92122
SAN FRANCISCO ............... (415) 826-8259
Box 40574, San Francisco, CA 94140
WASHINGTON, D.C.-BALTIMORE (202) 223-1455
a proof of Turner's generosity in giving them
permission.
Turner's First Recruit
Rebuffed in his attempts to find a home in anoth-
er organization, Turner formed Vanguard News-
letter in June 1969 on the following basis:
"We begin, in effect .. as a discussion group. It
is our hope that agreement on principle and pro-
gram will be forged, so that a democratic-
centralist organization will emerge from the
circle. We invite all those interested in dis-
cussion to contact us."
VNL remains a catch-all literary discussion group
"hoping" to achieve "agreement on principle and
program" in the great by and by, while posturing as
a hard Leninist formation. We will see what kind
of political animals ac cepted Turner's invitation.
Robert Sherwood was expelled from the SL
for Signing a "Negotiations Now" leaflet, thus
breaking SL diSCipline to cross the class line.
At about the same time, he legally emigrated to
Canada to avoid the draft, thus violating our policy
that when drafted, proletarian revolutionaries
enter the army to carry the anti-war struggle to
conscripted working-class youth. Sherwood then
joined the Workers League and became leader of
its Canadian "section," making a mockery of the
WL's public pOSition against draft resistance.
When Spartacist denounced the WL's hypocritical
opportunism over Sherwood, the WL reacted with
hysteria, terming us "the fingerman of the world
capitalists," falsely claiming that the references
to Sherwood's draft-dodging would jeopardize him
legally. Significantly, this archtypically Stalinist
slander occurred in the same issue of the Bulletin
as a gloating report on the Turner split based on
documents he gave them.
While as usual using Aesopian formulations,
Turner solidarized with the WL-Sherwood ac-
cusations (VNL, February 1970):
"Should one judge the SL's actions in regard to
Sherwood as isolated incidents or even as a
vindictive, perhaps only semi-conscious wish for
harrassment of such opponents by the repressive
apparatus of the capitalist state? We have ruled
out the first alternative . We have informed
others of our belief that the latter possibilities
are most probable."
Turner had been a member of the SL Political
Bureau when the Spartacist denouncing Sherwood
and the WL appeared (March-April 1968). He
made no objections at the time and presumably
supported the article. A year and a half later,
Turner is accusing the SL leadership-of which
he was then a part! -of turning political opponents
over to the cops. The apparent mystery is solved
by the fact that in late 1969 Sherwood had a
falling out with the WL and transformed the Canad-
ian WL into the Toronto VNL Committee. To re-
cruit one slimy opportunist and draft-dodger to
boot, Turner was prepared to retroactively make
himself a "capitalist finger man. "
NYC Police Strike
Under normal circumstances and with an eye
on the record, most organizations claiming to be
revolutionary can present their politics as princi-
pled and plausible. The real test of an organiza-
tion's revolutionary capacity is its reaction to un-
expected or complex social struggles (e.g., the
Chinese "Cultural Revolution," the 1968 NYC
teachers' strike, the present conflict in Ulster).
Such a test was the 1970 New York City pOlice
strike.
The WL predictably embraced the cops as a
militant wing of the working class. While VNL
dissociated itself from the WL's extreme rantings
(without naming the WL), it put forth the funda-
mental programmatic element of the WL position-
labor movement support for apolice strike victory
(VNL, January 1971):
"The rank and file of the entire labor movement
must demand that their leaderships enter into a
united front and a binding commitment for a
r;;enel'al strike in the event that either strike-
breaking weapon is resorted to by the City."
The strike reflected the growing sense of inde-
pendent esprit by the cops and hostility to what
they considered the "permissiveness" of politi-
cians and juries toward black, Puerto Rican and
student militants. A victory for the police strike,
particularly defying the National Guard, would
have removed the tenuous fetters of bourgeois
legality from the armed fist of the state, allowing
that armed fist to rise above the traditional
bourgeois state in bonapartist fashion, while re-
maining the guardian of the capitalist class.
A victorious police strike would mean
the unleashing of unrestrained racist terror
against the black ghettos. It should be noted that
7
VNL's critical support to the police strike took
place a few months before VNL solidarized with
the Newton wing of the Panthers, who would cer-
tainly have been one of the first victims of a
cop victory.
Turner Chases OCI
As part of the developing split in the "Inter-
national Committee" between the British Socialist
Labour League and the French Organisation
Communiste Internationaliste in 1971, the latter
aggressively lined up international supporters on a
power-bloc basis. Lacking contacts in North
America, the OCI was prepared to investigate
using VNL. Turner, in turn, tried to use the
attraction of the OCI franchise to strengthen his
domestic discussion-regroupment operation.
Thus, Turner proj ected a fusion of VNL, the
Sherwood group in Canada, the "revolutionary
DeLeonist
H
Socialist Forum and the Communist
Tendency, a group led by David Fender which had
recently split from the SWP.
Turner's appetites for the OCI franchise were
clearly reflected in the September and October
1971 issues of VNL. Turner became a self-
appointed attorney for the Partido Obrero Revo-
lucionario of Bolivia, the OCl's ally against
the SLL/WL:
"We do not consider it permissible to lump the
POR with the Stalinists and Pabloists as does
Tim Wohlforth We believe that the Bolivian
comrades made serious errors . It is only by
learning from their mistakes that the comrades
of the POR can overcome them in time, can yet
lead the Bolivian working class . to power."
The same issue contains an effusive, uncritical
greeting to the congress of the OCI youth group:
"We wish you every success in your congress
and in politically arming the youth of France for
the socialist revoluti&." (For our critique of the
OCl's opportunism over Bolivia and the youth
question, see Workers Vanguard No.3, Decem-
ber 1971.)
However, the international fusion meeting,
held in Canada in late September 1971, was a
disaster for Turner's grandiose ambitions. The
internal contradictions of Turner's motley com-
bination exploded. Half of the VNL, i.e., Harold
Robins and Bob Davis, went into "opposition"
and split. RefUSing to unite with the draft-dodger
SherWOOd, the ranks of the CT split from their
political leader and spokesman, David Fender.
(The CT, Robins and Davis have since trans-
ferred their allegiance to the IS.)
Naturally, the conference with the OCI repre-
sentative was not reported in VNL. But by
November, VNL's attitude toward the OCI had
changed 180 degrees. In the November 1971 VNL
we read, "By embraCing Lora [head of the POR],
the OCI assumes full responsibility for poliCies
which led to the Bolivian defeat." The article
concludes, "The Bolivian test was miserably failed
by all organizations identifying with both the IC
andU.Sec." Turner termed the IC left-centrist and
accused the OCI as well as the SLL of gangsterism
against other left-wing tendencies. Had the OCI
suddenly changed its spots before the November
VNL issue? No, what changed was Turner's
scheme for using the OCI to construct his
grouplet.
Turner/Fender Rolten Bloc
The OCI regroupment drive did produce another
recruit for Turner: David Fender, who left the
CT ranks behind in order to join VNL. Under
Fender'S tutelage, the CT had developed two con-
troversial positions which they regarded as ex-
tremely important: the CT critically supported
the Liu faction in the Chinese "Cultural Revo-
lution" and called for the "proletarian military
policy," trade union control of the standing army
with conscription.
Fender had supported the Liu faction on the
grounds that this conservative resistance on the
part of the bureaucracy to the adventuristic
and austerity poliCies of Mao reflected pressure
to defend the material interests of the working
masses. Turner, however, had supported the
Maoist Red Guards, taken in by their "anti-
bureaucratic" and egalitarian rhetoric. Thus
Fender and Turner have diametrically opposed
positions on contemporary Chinese politics. And
more significantly, since Fender joined up with
Turner, VNL has carried no material on political
revolution in a country called China, which
merely contains a third of the human race, One
of the hallmarks of any centrist group is pro-
found anti-internationalism. As long as an ac-
commodation can be reached on domestic issues,
the most fundamental differences over revolution-
ary policy in "other" countries become merely
continued on page 10

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SWP/WONAAC Sink
Bourgeois Swamp

In
The decline of the petty-bourgeois women's
liberation movement as it has existed for the
past several years is a fact apparent to most
radical activists and ostensible revolutionaries.
The only organization which seems not to have
ass i mil ate d this fact of life is the self-
proclaimed leader of the "mass feminist move-
ment," the Socialist Workers Party, and its
youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, This
blindness may be attributed to the SWP /YSA's
heavy organizational commitment to its front
group, the Women's National Abortion Action
Coalition. The SWP /YSA has built WONAAC as
a liberal-reformist organization whose three
demandS aim at attracting middle-class women
and their Democratic Party representatives.
The SWP /YSA' s desperate attempt to funnel the
women's movement into the single-issue abor-
tion repeal campaign in order to "attract the
broadest possible number of women" has itself
been a Significant factor in the demise of the
movement.
The third National Women's Conference on
Abortion, held July 15-16 at Hunter College in
New York under the auspices of WONAAC, sur-
passed the previous two in endless boring hours
of petty, non-political ramblings and mindless
enthusing over non-existent "victories," The
fact that of the 800 women who were actually
interested enough to register for this confer-
ence (less than two-thirds of the attendance at
the previous conference) fewer than half re-
mained by the second day itself bears witness to
the tragic dead end to which the women's move-
ment has come in the past few years.
The conference was frought with evident deep
rifts within the WONAAC leadership itself, final-
ly coming to a head with the resignation of eight
national coordinators and staff on the second
day. Much of the criticism raised by the main
oppositional grouping within WONAAC, centered
around Rose Weber (one of those who eventually
resigned), took the form of vicious red-baiting
accusations of SWP "domination and manipula-
tion" of WONAAC. The SWP is unable to fight
red-baiting effectively because its reformist as-
pirations do not allow it to stand openly as com-
munists and fight for leaderShip on the basis of
program. All that the SWP has to offer is an ef-
fective organization of cadres trained to tail-end
the "mass movements" it claims to lead. While
the Weber grouping picked up on some key de-
fects in WONAAC's politics and the SWP method
of "leadership," the group represented a split to
the right, probably headed straight back into the
Democratic Party. For the most part these op-
positionists are simply extending feminist and
class-collaborationist principles taught them by
the SWP but which the SWP itself cannot ex-
plicitly endorse because of formal residues of
its past socialist traditions.
SWPjWONAAC Push
Class- Collaboration
This point is demonstrated by WONAAC's
empty claims of "independence" from bourgeois
political parties. In the June 26 issue of the
WONAAC Newsletter well-known SWP spokes-
man Kipp Dawson argued against the tactic of
legislative lobbying asking: "How can women be
most effective in forcing the legislators to grant
the right to abortion?" Later in the article-
after bragging of the support to WONAAC of
such "women's liberationists" as Shirley Chis-
holm, Mary Lindsay and Bella Abzug-Dawson
answers her question: "When thousands of women
are marching in the streets for this right [abor-
tion], legislators will sit up and take notice." A
militant-sounding strategy-for the purpose of
pressuring liberal legislators.
One reason why WONAAC has repeatedly
thrown off splits to the right is the contradic-
tion between this stated "principle of independ-
ence" from the bourgeoisie and support of bour-
geois politicians in all but the direct electoral
sense. Those trained in the feminist-reformist
WONAAC school are only being consistent when
they yearn to support capitalist politicians like
Abzug, whose so-called Abortion Rights Act of
1972 is being backed by WONAAC with a petition
campaign. The SWP is unable to provide any
political justification for the "principle of inde-
pendence" besides the claim that endorSing any
candidate would "narrow the coalition."
For communists the reason for a complete
break with capitalist politiCians lies in the
understanding that the oppreSSion of women is
one of the pillars upon which the capitalist sys-
tem rests, Struggles against women's oppression
will be bitterly opposed by the capitalist state
and its political agents. On occasion reform is-
sues may be supported by particular politicians,
but this "support" inevitably comes down to cyn-
ical manipulation to garner votes, as was amply
demonstrated by the maneuverings around the
abortion issue at the Democratic Convention.
Such an analysis of the nature of capitalism
is well known to the ex-Marxist SWP. The SWP's
rationale for this elementary betrayal is that
breaking with the class enemy and its agents
would prevent WONAAC from "bringing in the
greatest number of women."
Abortion and the Family
Similarly with the issue of "free abortion on
demand." The SWP itself has admitted that "the
part of this demand that calls for free abortion
on demand goes beyond democratic demands,
raises the concept of socialization of medical
care, and answers a need of the most oppressed
and exploited" (International Socialist Review,
November 1971). Yet the SWP /YSA has consistent-
ly fought against this as a demand for WONAAC,
thus criminally abandoning the "need of the most
oppressed and exploited" for the sake of its lib-
eral supporters! The refusal to fight for free
legal abortion in itself cuts WONAAC off from
working-class women, especially the most op-
pressed layers of the class, who know they will
have about as much chance to obtain an expen-
sive legal abortion as they have to take a (legal)
airplane trip.
In itself the issue of abortions is a reform
demand, For revolutionaries, particular reforms
which strike blows at the oppressive institutions
of capitalism and increase the capacity of the
working class to struggle must be supported. But
the revolutionary always seeks to pose demands
which transcend the capitalist in-
crease the consciousness of the exploited and
oppressed of the objective need for socialist
revolution as the only way to fully achieve and
safeguard their needs, and lead to greater class
organization and higher forms of struggle on the
part of the working masses.
The SWP /YSA, however, has deliberately built
WONAAC as a reformist organization. It has
opposed adopting the "free abortion" demand
which impliCitly calls into question capitalist
private property relations; it has fought the
broadening of WONAAC's three official demands
into a program linking up the abortion fight with
the class struggle in all its aspects; it has spread
illusions which directly impede the development
of revolutionary consciousness. WONAAC teach-
es the militant women to place their trust in the
class enemy and their female agents in the cap-
italist parties. WONAAC pushes the illusion that
abortion repeal means "control of our own bod-
ies." A woman who works a grueling eight-hour
day at a meaningless job and returns to an eve-
ning of petty housework drudgery hardly has
"control of her own body"!
The emancipation of women requires the
struction of capitalism, Women under capitalism
are exploited as workers and doubly oppressed by
the family, the main social bulwark of women's
oppression. Achieving the right to abortion would
strike a blow against the material and ideological
props of the family system, but the family will
not wither away until a replacement for it can be
created. Socialization of household duties, only
possible after the abolition of private property
WORKERS VANGUARD
Clara Zetkin, January 1918
and the establishment of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, will open the road to the gradual
replacement of the family.
Spartacist and the Women's Movement
Members of the Spartacist League and the
Women and Revolution group intervened in the
WONAAC Conference to counterpose a revolu-
tionary proletarian strategy and program. W&R
groups, based on the transitional program of the
SL, have intervened in the women's movement,
consistently presenting an outspOken socialist
alternative, explicitly anti-reformist and anti-
feminist, SL/W&R has insisted that the women's
movement cannot go forward until it adopts a
proletarian perspective and recognizes that the
uniquely leading class in the SOCialist revolution
LESSONS FROM THE BO
Toward a
Most of the ostensibly socialist organizations
in the U,S. have pursued an opportunist, tail-
endist policy toward the women's liberation
movement, But for others, the question is seen
as inherently petty-bourgeois, and the existing
movement as the only possible expression of
struggle against the oppreSSion of women, Thus
the Workers League has expressed contempt for
the current movement and has ostentatiously
abstained from participation in it. OppOSition
to the middle-class and feminist-reformist orien-
tation of the existing movement does not produce
abstention by revolutionaries, but rather demands
energetic intervention with the correct
tarian program and strategy, For the Workers
League, however, blanket condemnation of the
movement is merely a cheap way to establish
"proletarian" credentials, The WL denies the
special oppreSSion of women and maintains that
the organization of women around resistance to
their oppression Simply divides the working
class. Unfortunately this cynical position keys
into one of the stereotypes of communists
petrated by anti-communist feminists, who main-
tain that communists are not concerned with
women's oppreSSion and have no legitimate place
in the movemenL
In forswearing the fight against the oppres-
sion of women the Workers League once again
abandons a key component of the Marxist pro-
gram, developed initially by Marx and Engels
themselves and later extended by the Bolshevik
party and the Third InternationaL The current
women's movement, with its disdain for "male-
dominated" history and Marxist theory, is as
ignorant of the history of socialist work among
women as is the Workers League, The historical
development of communist organization and pro-
gram for work among women can provide guide-
lines for the rebirth of a revolutionary women's
movement as part of the struggle of the prole-
tariat for state power,
Birth of the Socialist
Women's Movement
The drawing of women into large-scale in-
dustry was a profoundly progressive step and
laid the basis for their industrial and political
organization, In many cases women were ad-
mitted into trade unions but frequently, as in the
case of the Lancashire weavers in 1824, as
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September 1972
is the proletariat under the leadership of the
vanguard party.
SL/W&R presented a motion to the Confer-
ence, "For a class Hne-not a sex line," which
demanded the exclusion of all bourgeois politi-
cians, male and female, from the women's liber-
ation movement. As part of our insistence that
the struggle for the emancipation of women must
be seen as part of the fight of the working class
for socialist revolution, the motion demanded that
the Conference break with male exclusionism by
allowing men who support the struggle full and
equal participation. The fight for class unity
requires intransigent opposition to male exclu-
sionism just as it requires a relentless struggle
against male chauvinist backwardness, on the
baSis of a transitional program which fights
against the special oppression of women as part
of a struggle for the needs of the class as a
whole. Elements of the W&R program include:
equal pay for equal work, free quality medical
care for all, union organization of the unorgan-
ized, strikes against the Vietnam war, the build-
ing of a labor party to fight for a workers'
government.
Feminism vs. Communism
The kind of "leadership" offered by the SWP
was exactly what the women's movement did not
need to break out of its headlong plunge into im-
potent reformism. The movement emerged in the
1960's out of the petty-bourgeois student move-
ment--the New Left. Much of the original New
Left baggage was carried into the women's move-
ment: the early women's movement in particular
was imbued with typical New Left anti-"elitism?"
anti-theoretical biases and contempt for the les-
sons of history. Frustration with the male chau-
vinism of the New Left was a catalyst for the
emergence of the women's movement. The New
Left dead-end succeeded in discouraging its share
of radical youth from a lifetime to
revolutionary politics, and some women used the
women's movement as a way of seeking personal
"liberation" and thus a way out of politics alto-
gether. For others the women's movement was
simply an extension of New Leftpoly-vanguardist
constituency pOlitics, a logical of the
propOSition that "whites should organize whites,
blacks should organize blacks." For some this
idea meant that the only legitimate political work
for women was the women's liberation movement.
This led to disguised red-baiting of women in so-
called "male-dominated" (i.e., sexually non-
exclusionist) political organizations, and the
charge that socialist women were fighting "other
people's" struggles.
A heterogeneous feminist tendency insisted
that women were the "revolutionary class" in
modern society destined to carry out the revolu-
tion against the male-dominated society. Some
even envisioned a civil war between men and wo-
men for political control. What kind of economic
system they would gain control of was never dis-
cussed, although many made the blatantly male
chauvinist assumption that it would be more "hu-
mane" because it would be run by women (the
gentle sex?). The various tendencies of feminism
hold in commOn the view that the fundamental
division in this society is sex and thus all women
regardless of class can be united in fighting for
their liberation from "male-dominated" society.
9
Clearly the politics of the SWP cannot provide
any alternative strategy for the women's move-
ment. In every field of its activity the SWP /YSA
pushes class collaboration and petty-bourgeois
poly-vanguardism. It is in this sense thatthe SWP
is correct when it claims to be the main builder
of the women's movement: the SWP has indeed
been instrumental in building into the women's
movement all the reformist illusions and bour-
geois traps which have led the current women's
liberation movement to an impasse.
For a Socialist Women's Movement!
Petty-bourgeois feminism has shown itself un-
able to construct a viable women's movement. But
the Menshevik policies of the SWP /WONAAC and
the utopian petty-bourgeois radicalism of the fem-
inists have not been able to entirely dissipate the
powerful impulse to struggle for the emanCipation
of women, for this impulse is rooted in resistance
to the brutal economic and social oppression of
capitalism. The bourgeoisie and its agents have
been able to successfully channel the women's
struggle for a time into electoral manipulation,
token hiring of women in certain industries, and
sensational or sympathetic coverage in the media.
But the resistance of the oppressed to their ex-
ploitation and degradation under capitalism can
never be eliminated until oppression itself is
eliminated following the destruction of capitalism.
Militant struggle for women's emancipation will
manifest itself again, and must base itself upon
the tradition of the socialist women's movement-
a long and proud tradition which the reformists
and feminists must obscure and deny, a tradition
which offers the only road forward for the wom-
en's liberation movement
BOLSHEVIK STRUGGLE AGAINST WOMEN'S OPPRESSION
Communist Women's Movement!
second-class union members. In some cases
working women formed their own class organiza-
tions in response to their exclusion from the
established trade union movement and their rele-
gation to largely unorganized sections of indus-
try. In the U.S. separate women's trade unions
such as the Tailoresses' Union and the Shoe
Binders' Union were formed as early as 1830.
Militant strikes were led by the Ladies Waist
Makers Union in 1909. However, such separate
organizations we r e inevitably superceded by
unions of men and women, as working-class men
gradually recognized that the economic interests
of both sexes were inseparable. The unions took
up only the purely economic aspect of women's
lives. Other issues became the property of the
growing bourgeois feminist movements.
The Social Democratic (later Communist)
women's movement was separate and distinct
from both the purely economic trade union move-
ment and the bourgeois feminists. This is clear
in an account by Lenin(Collected Works, Vol. 13)
of the International Socialist Congress held at
Stuttgart, September 1907:
"The resolution on women's suffrage was also
adopted unanimously. Only one Englishwoman
from the semi-bourgeois Fabian SoCiety defend-
ed the admissibility of a struggle not for full
women's suffrage but for one limited to those
posseSSing property. The Congress rejected this
unconditionally and declared in favor of women
workers campaigning for the franchise, not in
conjunction with the bourgeois supporters of
women's rights, but in conjunction with the class
parties of the proletariat. The Congress recog-
nized that in the campaign for women's suffrage
it was necessary to uphold fully the principles
of socialism and equal rights for men and wom-
en without distorting those prinCiples for the
sake of expediency. ft
The necessity for a clear, unqualified class
line separating the SOCialist women's movement
from the bourgeois feminists was understood
from the first informal gathering of women so-
cialists held in London in 1896. The Gotha Con-
gress of the German Social Democratic Party
held earlier that same year had, at Clara Zet-
kin's insistence, laid the groundwork for agita-
tional work among proletarian women for the
pur po s e 0 f draWing them into the general
working-class movement,
Debate in the German party centered around
the question of the need for special organiza-
tional forms devoted to work in this section of
the proletariat. At issue was whether this work
should take place within or outside the party
organization. The final deciSion was to estab-
lish a women's section within the party. It was
based on two considerations: (1) the struggle of
women workers for emancipation is linked in-
separably to the struggle of the entire working
class against capitalism; (2) as long as women
workers are prevented from full involvement in
the working-class movement, a special organ-
izational mechanism devoted to work among wom-
en is necessary. The factors impeding women's
full partiCipation in the proletarian movement
were seen to flow from women's role in the
family which resulted in their relegation to the
least organized, most oppressed sections of the
class; lack of education and intellectual develop-
ment; and victimization by backward social atti-
tudes and laws.
The women's section had a great deal of or-
ganizational autonomy (partially, but not entire-
ly, because women were legally barred from
entrance into political organizations in Germany
until 1908). At the same time the section was
politically responsible to the leading bodies of
the party. This organizational form upheld the
principle of revolutionary working-class unity
under a single party banner while allowing for
the application of a variety of methods of propa-
ganda and agitation among women. Although other
forms of organization were used elseWhere, the
German form was the most widespread and suc-
cessful and seemed to allow for the greatest
clarity of theory and unity in action of the com-
mon movement.
Bolshevik Work Among Women
The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
(Bolshevik) carried out extensive propaganda
among women workers prior to the October
Revolution. The pages of its journal, Rabotnitsa
(Woman Worker), which first appeared under the
direction of the Bolshevik Central Committee on
International Women's Day 1914, contained po-
lemics directed against the bourgeois feminist
movements of RUSSia and Europe and against
the Mensheviks' policy of male exclusionism in
the women's movement. Articles on the family
and the causes of women's oppreSSion, the means
of their emanCipation, current domestic and in-
ternational affairs and the participation of women
in the workers' movement appeared in the seven
issues of Rabotnitsa which were published be-
tween February 1914 and the outbreak of World
War I in July.
In the spring of 1914 women from the major
industrial centers of RUSSia elected delegates,
largely Bolshevik supporters, for the Third In-
ternational Socialist Women's Conference sche-
duled to take place in Vienna later that year,
Due to the intervention of the war the conference
did not take place, but at the instigation of the
Bolshevik Central Committee a congress of
left-wing socialist women was held in Berne,
Switzerland on 26-28 March 1915. Of the thirty
delegates attending, four of the six RUSSian dele-
gates were Bolsheviks who brought with them a
draft resolution written by Lenin. The resolu-
tion demanded: Break with the SOCial Democratic
betrayers-Turn the imperialist war into a civil
war! It called for agitation among the masses
for socialist revolution, The resolution was de-
feated by the centrists and pacifists, as a simi-
lar resolution was later defeated at the Zimmer-
continued on page 11
10
Continued from. page 7
... VANGUARD NEWSLETTER
interesting discussion topics.
While a leader in the CT, Fender favored con-
scription and called for trade union control of
Nixon's army. The "proletarian military policy"
either reflects utopian illusions or soCial chau-
vinist impulses. In the case of the CT, it also
reflected a machismo world-view-a worship of
the army because it is tough and manly. The CT
ranks felt so strongly about this position that
they refused to unite with Turner'S draft-dodger
protegee, Sherwood. But for politicians of the
calibre of Fender and Turner fundamental dif-
ferences in policy toward the army-the essence
of the bourgeois state-are no bar to unity.
Mythical Rank and File Caucuses
Despite its flexible membership standards,
VNL wasn't doing so well. Therefore, early this
year, T urn e rca m e up with an even looser
group in the guise of a pan-union oppositional
formation, the Committee for Rank and File Cau-
cuses, based on only two programmatic demands:
opposition to state wage control and support for a
labor party. The purpose of the CRFC is to enable
some impotent literary grouplets-VNL, Socialist
Forum, the "New York Revolutionary Commit-
teen-to pretend to have a labor movement
orientation.
The CRFC is a completely phony gimmick.
'vNL has no union caucuses, has no influence in
any union caucuses, and conducts no mass work
except for an occasional leaflet. TUrner might
just as well have called a "national network of
soviets" since VNL is currently just as active
in organizing soviets as it is in organizing union
caucuses.
For Leninists, a union caucus is a means for
winning the most advanced workers to the van-
guard party through the process of struggle.
The party intervenes through party fractions, the
arm of the party in mass organizations of the
class. A union caucus is necessarily an alter-
nati ve embryonic union leadership and must have a
transitional program comprehensive enough to
provide consistent communist leadership of that
union. The CRFC is that classic centrist Con-
cept-the programmatic united front substituting
for a party. A united front is a tactical alliance
Continued from page 5
West COllst
NPAC
SWP could reach a compromise with the pro-
McGovern leaders caucusing in the next room.
This provided an unusually long discussion period,
during which the SWP was forced into adefensive
posture on its 1 eft flank, against numerous
SL/RCY speakers. Finally, a McGovern spokes-
man announced that after caucusing, the McGovern
forces were withdrawing their request for official
NP AC en<iorsement, since that would run against
NP AC' s official "independence." He neglected to
mention that it would also run the risk of break-
ing up a convenient recruiting ground for liberal
Democrats!
The "Power" of the
Anti-war Movement
During the discussion, an SL spokesman point-
ed out that the NLF offensive created an "anti-
war" bourgeoisie, which finds the slogan "out
now" totally acceptable to its current imperial-
ist needs, resulting in a swelling of McGovern and
NP AC forces. NP AC spokesman Stephanie Coontz
argued that the "power" of the anti-war move-
ment forced the bourgeoisie to consider with-
drawal. As the official NP AC resolution said,
"The movement drove Lyndon Johnson out of
politics; forced Richard Nixon to get the troops
out of Cambodia and withdraw half a million Gl's
from Vietnam; and turned public sentiment de-
cisively against the war." Yet this "powerful"
anti-war movement has been going for seven
years and Nixon continues bombing with impunity!
It was in fact the power of the DRV /NLF armies
to fight for specific aims. It is not a permanent
organization capable of leading the class. The
CRFC is simply a means by which opportunists
can "unite" without taking any responsibility for
one another, leaving each component free to
pursue its own particular hobbyhorse ("Trotsky-
ism," DeLeonism, Maoist adventurism) while
hanging together for mutual back-scratching (as
over the St. Louis incident) and a semblance of
wider influence.
Turner's opportunism is particularly visible in
the CRFC' s two-point program. In the 1968 faction
fight, Turner essentially reduced the communist
trade union program to the upgrading of poorly
paid black workers. But if the fight against the
oppression of black workers was everything for
TUrner then, it is nothing for him now. The CRFC
program does not even mention the race question!
The March issue of VNL began yet another
series of articles on the Spartacist League, again
attacking the SL as a "not very serious student-
oriented personality cult around James Robert-
son" in an article typically entitled "The Sparta-
cist League: A 'Workers Vanguard' for Students."
What unleashed this latest spate of VNL vicious at-
tacks on the SL for its supposed "student orienta-
tion" was the SL's intervention into the CRFC's
"founding conference" on January 25. What Turn-
er, assiduously cultivating the image of an
"honest worker," does not bother to mention
was that while he himself is a senior professional
in a white-collar job complete with private secre-
tary, the SL supporters who attended the CRFC
meeting as observers consisted of our trade union
director, a long-time delegate for a city employ-
ees' union and the editor of an oppositional caucus
newspaper in a transport union. And behind that
delegation lay a history of struggle to construct
real union caucuses based on a transitional pro-
gram, a proven capacity to carry communist
politics into the union movement, and a rapidly
growing involvement in oppositional struggles in
the working class.
The SL never mechanically equates an individ-
uals's political line directly with his personal
social status. But Turner's deliberately con-
structed proletarian image is a fraud. More than
most left-wing organizations, VNL is defined by
which accomplished the above feats, in the 1968
Tet offensive and the 1970 Cambodia battle
particularly.
An NP AC spokesman boasted, "we built Mc-
Govern; McGovern didn't build the anti-war move-
ment," to which an SL member responded, "Yes,
that's true, NP AC did build McGovern!" SWP
big-wig Harry Ring soon got up to restore the
facade of SWP radicalism by stating he would
vote for Jenness/Pulley in November; but at the
same time, he asserted that we all have a duty
to "rally the American people" against "this
monstrous war." Ring concluded by saying every-
one should "go their own way" on election day
as long as unity is achieved. The Jenness/Pulley
campaign, based on a liberal program hardly
distinguishable from that of Shirley Chisholm,
except for the "socialist" label, serves quali-
tatively the same function as the Communist
Party's campaign: a left cover for the party's
connection with the Democrats. The only differ-
ence is that the CP is more brazen about its
intentions inside the Democrat Party. While Ring
votes SWP, the bourgeoisie will go its own way
with the youth collected by the SWP's pop front!
In the summing-up remarks, SL spokesman Al
Nelson ripped into the SWP, recalling that "a
line was drawn in blood last year," and charging,
"this place reeks of bourgeois pacifism." Nelson
noted the obvious deal that had been made between
the SWP and the prO-McGovern forces and de-
manded of the SWP, "quit calling yourselves
Trotskyists" and join McGovern openly. He em-
phasized the most important aspect of the SL/
RCY motion-expulsion of the bougeoisie.
As expected, the official NP AC resolution was
passed overwhelmingly, but the SL/RCYproposal
received a solid bloc of about 40 votes, emerging
clearly as the only communist opposition present.
The other "opposition" resolutions received a tiny
handful of votes each. Once again, as the SWP
delivers its pop-front supporters to McGovern,
NP AC has served as a litmus test for principled
pOlitics, and only the SL/RCY passed. _
WORKERS VANGUARD
its social composition. VNL consists of older,
materially well-off radicals who have come
through harder, more dynamic organizations.
They are burnt out, reacting against the pressures
of an aggressive organization and resentful of
the demands which such an organization makes
upon its experienced and leading members.
If Turner had been remotely principled, he
would have become a hospital worker carrying
out the policy he claims was the baSis for his
opposition in and split from the SL. Turner claimed
he had an iron-clad formula for winning black
workers, which was not vitiated by small size
(e.g., the MLCRC after the loss of its only two
hospital workers). In the years since he left the
SL, the Turner grouping has done no trade union
work and virutally no mass work of any kind.
Turner has become a parasitic intriguer in the
ostensibly Trotskyist movement seeking blocs
with anyone he can find. Despite his posturing
in his reSignation from the SL that he did not
"intend to build or join an anti-Spartacist League,"
the subjective impulse in the formation of VNL
was nothing mor e than Harry Turner's wounded ego
pouring out hostility and slander against the SL.
The Politics of Dilettantism
When Turner left the SL, the instability that
he had shown while an SL member became an all-
consuming desire to show us up no matter how.
But in the years since then, the underlying politi-
cal impulse which led to his break has been spelled
out. At bottom, the VNL is a second-string
IS, and it is indeed the IS that VNL resembles in
its practice, but superficially without the burden of
the discreditable history of the IS. VNL and IS
often compete for the same recruits and have
shown a capacity to transfer membership smooth-
ly. Where Fender joined VNL, his former com-
rades in the CT joined IS. When Turner's long-
time supporters, Fredricks, Davis and Robins,
left VNL they joined IS. Since the formal pOlitics
of VNL and IS are not particularly similar, it
is clear that their similar attraction for such
people stems from another factor. VNL and IS
are the most finished expreSSions of dilettantism
among ostenSibly revolutionary groups.
As James Cannon observed, participation in the
revolutionary movement often burns out people
and destroys their combativeness. The cadres of
a serious communist organization function under
considerable inner tension. They must take re-
sponsibility for the pOlitical lives and well-being
of their comrades, are held strictly accountable
for their actions and opinions, must suppress
subjective impulses for the sake of the collective
and often have their pride hurt in internal
political struggle. These pressures on a commu-
nist militant are particularly difficult to with-
stand in the U.S., where a pervasive anti-
communist social climate degrades and ridicules
the concept of a professional revolutionary.
Thus the revolutionary movement inevitably
throws off burnt-out shells. These rejects often
retain a certain interest in and sympathy for
revolutionary ideas. They find or create organiza-
tions like IS or VNL that allow them to dabble
in revolutionary politics, but do not demand a
disciplined partiCipation or a necessarily high
level of activity. The VNL group is essentially
a rest home for burnt-out would-be communists.
Most of its supporters belong there and we have
no interest in them. However, we must set
the record straight in the interests of commu-
nist sanitation, and we have an obligation to try to
deflect younger comrades from entering, out of
naivete or lack of knowledge, this final resting
place for the rejects of our movement.
We have not very often been the object of
repeated public polemical attack, the involuted 1984
logic of Tim Wohlforth aside. And conSidering
that Turner appears bent on devoting the rest
of his natural life to us, it becomes objectively
necessary, despite the source, to wipe the smears
off our political reputation. As Marxists, we
are not cummitted solely to day-to-day tasks,
but rather to the continuing historical respon-
sibility to shape the future of the revolutionary
movement as well. We assert and are prepared
to prove against any challenge that the Sparta-
cist League is the organizational embOdiment of
revolutionary Marxism and stands qualitatively
above and counterposed to all the imposters.
To leave a Turner unscathed might permit the
impression to prevail that we are but the best of
that dreary lot of contemporary radical fauna
in America-e.g., CP, PL, S'VP, IS, NCLC-
that each in its own way are break-downproducts
of the theoretical inciSiveness and whole-hearted
committment in class struggle that are the true
heritage of Lenin's Third and Trotsky's Fourth
Internationals. _
September 1972 11 -

Continued from page 9
... Women's
Movement
wald Conference. But the congress was an im-
portant step in the re-crystallization of a revo-
lutionary tendency in opposition to the social-
patriotic renegades of the Second International,
and was thus part of the process of polarization
culminating in the founding of a new International
-the Third International.
In Petrograd in early fall of 1917, the Bol-
shevik Bureau for Work among Women held its
first Conference of Working Women. As part of
the work of the conference the Party and non-
Party delegates were acquainted with the goals
of the Bolsheviks and prepared for the expected
uprising. The conference was interrupted by the
outbreak of the Bolshevik seizure of power, in
which the delegates actively participated, re-
ass e m b Ii n g aft e r war d s to resume their
deliberations.
"An International
Communist Women's Movement"
Within the Second International itself no spe-
cial body responsible for work among women
had ever been established. It was left to the first
four congresses of the Third International to
extend and codify the work begun earlier by the
German and Russian parties. Debate continued
to rage within the Communist movement over
the form of organization to be used in capitalist
and soviet states. In her 1920 Recollections of
Lenin Clara Zetkin quotes Lenin on the question:
"The first proletarian dictatorship is truly pav-
ing the way for the complete social equality of
women. It eradicates more prejudice than vol-
umes of feminist literature. However, in spite
of all this, we do not yet have an international
Communist women's movement and we must have
one without fail. We must immediately set about
starting it. Without such a movement, the work
of our International and of its parties is incom-
plete and never will be complete. Yet our revo-
lutionary work has to be fulfilled in its
entirety
"The Party must have organs-working groups,
commisSions, committees, sections or whatever
else they may be called-with the specific pur-
pose of rousing the broad masses of women,
bringing them into contact with the Party and
keeping them under its influence. This naturally
requires that we carry on systematic work among
the women. We must teach the awakened women,
win them over for the proletarian class struggle
under the leadership of the Communist Party,
and equip them for it ... The lack of interest in
politics and the otherwise anti-social and back-
ward psychology of these masses of women, the
narrow scope of their activities and the whole
pattern of their lives are undeniable facts. It
would be silly to ignore them, absolutely silly."
Discussion on the question led to the First
Conference of Communist Women held in 1920
on the initiative of the First Congress of the
Communist International, which established an
International Secretariat for work among women
with permanent representation on the Executive
Committee of the International. While ruling out
special communist organizations of women out-
side the party, the Congress made the establish-
ment of special administrative and organization-
al bodies within all party committees, "from the
big g est to the sma 11 est," legal and illegal,
obligatory. The "Thesis on Methods of Work
Among the Women of the Communist Party"
(Third Congress of the Third International, July
1921) stated:
"Woman's struggle against her double oppres-
sion (capitalism and her home and family sub-
servience), at its highest stage of development
assumes an international character, becoming
identified with the struggle of the proletariat of
both sexes under the banner of the Third Inter-
national for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
and the Soviet System.
" 0 the Third Congress, nevertheless, believes
that in view of: a) the present conditions of sub-
jection prevailing not only in the bourgeois capi-
talist countries, but also in countries under the
Soviet system, undergoing transition from capi-
talism to communism; b) the great inertness and
political ignorance of the masses of women, due
to the fact that they have been for centuries
barred from social life and to age-long slavery
in the family; and c) the special functions im-
posed upon women by nature-childbirth, and the
peculiarities attached to this, calling for the
protection of her strength and health in the in-
terests of the entire community, the Third Con-
gress therefore considers it necessary to find
special methods of work among the women of
the Communist Parties and establishes a stan-
dard of special apparatus within the Communist
Parties for the realization of this work."
The purposes of such bodies for systematic
work among women were to bring communist
women into deeper party involvement, to draw
new layers of women into the party, to fight
backward prejudices among both sexes in order
to foster consciousness of their common in-
terest in proletarian revolution, and to wage a
relentless battle against traditional bourgeois
customs, laws and ideology. Work among women
was seen as the task of the whole party:
"The women's committee must see to it that
agitation among the large masses of the women
proletariat be included in the general- work of
the party; that it does not remain a special task
of a small handful of communist women. They
must make all efforts that the agitation among
the women becomes a branch of the whole move-
ment, that it be carried on by all organizational
and pOlitical means at the disposal of the Party,
and be supported by the full authority of the
Party and its various organs."
Special propaganda organs directed toward wom-
en were initiated. Particular emphasis was laid
on the importance of linking the work of the
women's section with communist fractions in the
trade unions. This stemmed from the under-
standing that the full integration of women into
the work force, particularly the key layers of
the industrial proletariat, was a crucial step in
their political development and a necessary part
of forging unity in the working class.
The communist women were to carry the full
program and banner of the party among women
as part of the task of preparing the proletariat
to take power:
"The women's committees must put forward the
most important tasks of the proletariat, fight
for the unabridged slogans of the Communist
Party, of the Communists against the bourgeoisie
and social compromisers.
"While participating in the legislative, municipal
and other organizations of bourgeois States,
Communist women should strictly adhere to the
tactics of the party, not concerning themselves
so much with the realization of reforms within
the limits of the bourgeois world order, as tak-
ing advantage of every live question and demand
of the working women, as watch-words by which
to lead the women into the active mass struggle
for these demands, through the dictatorship of
the proletariat."
Dictatorship of the Proletariat
After the seizure of power in 1917, the Bol-
shevik party began with great determination to
overturn all the oppressive laws and institutions
which prevented women from participating as
full and equal members of society. The Bol-
shevikS undertook systematic agitational cam-
paigns to uproot and destroy the backward prej-
udices and social practices which were the heri-
tage of capitalism. Special departments under
the auspices of the party engaged peasant and
working-class women from throughout the Soviet
Union in carrying out the practical tasks of ful-
filling the needs of working women, as well as
general administrative and political tasks. During
this period the Bolshevik Central Committee
published two journals directed at peasant and
proletarian women, and over sixty provincial
periodicals and newspapers were published.
Tremendous advances were made in the status
of Soviet women. The fundamental propositions
first stated by Engels in The Origins of the Fami-
ly. Private Property arul the State guided this
undertaking:
" .. to emancipate woman and make her the
equal of the man is and remains an impossibility
so long as the woman is shut out from the social
productive labor and restricted to private domes-
tic labor. The emanCipation of women will onlv
be possible when woman can take part in
tion on a large social scale, and domestic work
no longer claims anvthing but an insiO'nificant
amoullt of her time. "
Social dining halls, laundry and child-care, en-
lightened legislation concerning marriage, di-
vorce, abortion and illegitimacy struck real blows
at the family as the main social institution of
women's oppreSSion. The women I s department
dealt with particular problems in the education
of women, drawing women into participation in
the work force more fully than ever before.
The Stalinist thermidor brutally reversed many
of these gains, and resurrected all the backward
mythology about the family and the role for women.
But the achievements of the Bolsheviks remain a
historic record of the enormous possibilities for
human freedom and development when state power
is wielded by the working class
Continued from page 1
France ...
the dollar and the pound, in which the u.s. bour-
geoisie has tried to foist its own economic prob-
lems off onto the backs of the working class and
petty-bourgeoisie internationally (as well as with-
in the U.S.), have had their effects on France.
Beginning in 1970-71 and increasing at a rapid
rate up to the present, inflation and unemploy-
ment have increased Significantly in France.
According to the official government agency, the
rate of inflation was 3% in but since
mid-1971 has been about 6% a year. The price
index administered by the CP-controlled Con-
federation Generale du Travail, France's largest
union, shows a rate of about 9% over the last
year.
Although European countries have long had low
unemployment rates by U.S. standards, unem-
ployment is growing significantly. In France, it
has doubled between January 1971 and July 1972,
and is currently about 2.3% (400,000). The gov-
ernment compounds unemployment by its manipu-
lation of imported foreign labor-from North
Africa, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia,
Turkey and Italy. Foreign labor is used to de-
press wages, to attack the unions (foreign work-
ers can be deported immediately with no reason
given, and are therefore extremely difficult to
organize) and as a reserve labor army. (This is
a policy France shares with other advanced
European countries, notably Germany and Swit-
zerland.) The problem of unemployment is par-
ticularly severe among younger workers, includ-
ing the ex-student population.
This is the background against which we must
view the important strikes of the past year or so:
the Renault strike of May 1971, the railroad
strike of June 1971, the Paris subway strike of
October 1971. In addition, there have been nu-
merous strikes in minor industries or small
plants which have taken on national importance
due to the role played by various political groups:
Pennaroya, Joint Creusot-
L 0 ire (D u n k irk), Paris-Nantes, Nouvelles
Galeries (Thionvielle and Richemont), Berliet,
to name only the most important between March
and June of 1972.
In a.llY- discussion of the French left, it is im-
portant to distinguish among the "left", i.e;, the
CP and the traditional socialist groups, and the
"extreme left" and "ultra-left." The CP lumps
everyone to its left together as "gauchistes"-
the ultra-left. "Gauchisme" is almost universally
a pejorative term, due to both its association
with the anarchist-spontaneist wings of the stu-
dent movement in 1968 (Cohn-Bendit, etc.) and
also the fact that "gauchisme" is the French
term for "left-wing communism" which Lenin
criticized so harshly. With the partial exception
of the Ligue Communiste (section of the United
Secretariat and fraternal party to the SWP),
French ostensibly Trotskyist groups, the Organ-
isation Communiste Internationaliste and Lutte
reject the term "gauchisme." They
view "gauchisme" as symptomatic of a degenerate
continued on next page
-

NUMSER 21 ioIH# ,946.54:
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GenesIS 0 a "
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The Case of Bola Tau:poe P.4GE 14
SttIIf"sse41)oaU11t1ds Expose \lIite4 Seere
JUST OUT. 25 cents.
P.O. Box 1377, G.P.O., New York, N.Y. 10001
12
Continued from page 11
France ...
petty-bourgeois milieu and refer to themselves
as the "extreme left."
Renault
Especially in view of the fact that gauchiste
milieus have tended to glorify these recent strikes
and hold them up as examples for working-class
action, it is important to appraise them care-
fully. The most important strike is doubtless that
at Renault in May 1971. Any strike at Renault
takes on immediate Significance, not only
cause of the economic importance of Renault in
France (Renault is the eighth largest auto manu-
facturer in the world and employs over 90,000
workers), but also because the Renault factory at
Billancourt (which employs 38,000 workers) is
on the edge of Paris, within the Paris subway
system, and because ever since the 1920's Renault
has been the bastion of Communist Party
ence in the working class. Renalt-Billancourt
has played a leading role in every major class
upsurge in France. Thus it is extremely im-
portant that the 1971 strike began as a wildcat-
which became total, including workers' occupa-
tion of the factory-only a few months after a
new contract (claimed as a "victory" by the CGT)
-was signed.
Since that time, there has been continued
small-scale activity at Renault, and the action of
the Renault workers has put an intense squeeze
on profits. Renault is a "nationalized" industry
which receives a government subsidy of some
$30 million a year (150 million francs). In 1971,
Renault had only the second deficit of its history
-$36 million (197 million francs). (The first, in
1961, was $2 million.) This is not entirely due
to the strike, since although profits in 1969 were
about $28 million, in 1970 they were only $1
million.
This sheds light on the significance of other
strikes. The overwhelming majority of these
strikes have been in marginal industries or fac-
tories, or in state-owned factories which are
attempting to be competitive on the capitalist
market. These marginal enterprises are rela-
tively highly vulnerable, while strikes in the na-
tionalized industries constitute a direct attack on
the state. To the extent that French capitalism is
caught in a squeeze between the U.S., Germany
and Japan, these strikes are also a prefiguration
of what may be in store in other, apparently more
"healthy," industries (Renault, etc.). The fact that
political elements in these strikes are never far
from the surface and that significant demands re-
volve around issues of working conditions and
layoffs adds to the worried premonitions of the
bourgeoisie.
The Union Apparatuses
The political underpinnings of these strikes
are emphasized by the structure and organization
of unions in France, which is vastly different
from that of the U.S. There are three main
unions: the CP-controlled CGT, the Church-
initiated (and still Church-dominated) Confedera-
tion F ranc;aise Democratique du Travail, and the
Force In addition, there are many
smaller and independent unions as well as a
number of company unions. Since the union shop
does not in France, all unions can compete
for representation in the same factory. In addi-
tion, since the largest union, the CGT, is con-
trolled by the CP, competition among unions is
also immediately political in nature, and tends
to revolve around an anti-communist axis. Thus,
for example, members of one union frequently
will not follow or respect a strike call of another
union within the same industry. This spring, in
the Post Office, the CFDT and FO refused to
honor a 24-hour strike called by the CGT, and
the CGT in turn worked during 24-hour strike
actions called by the CFDT and then by FO. None
of the unions maintain strike funds, and the CGT
has fought attempts to start them up. Strikes are
traditionally called for only 24 or 48 hours (al-
though this has changed somewhat since 1968)"
The splintering of unions can also be seen in its
most absurd form in, for example, the Paris
subway system, where each subway line within
the system has a different local. It can and does
happen therefore that one subway line will call a
24-hour strike which is respected by none of
the other lines. Given this sort of exercise in
futility, it is small wonder that the urge toward
militant united action is rising. French strikes
have traditionally been less militant than those
in the U.S., but recent strikes have increasingly
been marked by violence and police intervention.
1:1 most of the strikes listed above, the police,
National Guard ("Gardes Mobiles") orthe speCial
riot/tactical pOlice, the CRS, have intervened.
Faced with the threat of a class upsurge, the
unions and the party bureaucrats have evolved a
number of ways of trying to deal with the situation.
WORKERS VANGUARD
ginning to react against this combination of ad-
venturism and sellout by rejecting the CFDT. At
Creusot-Loire, in a strike led by the CFDT and
widely hailed in gauchiste milieus as a success,
recent union elections resulted in a loss by the
CFDT of nearly 40% of its votes from previous
elections. At Paris-Nantes, the CFDT lost 30%
of its votes. A two-month strike at Girosteel and
a nine-week strike at Nouvelles Galeries, a de-
partment store, resulted in mass desertion from
the CFDT and in each case the formation of a
company union.
In recognition of this trend, the CFDT has
most recently moved to expel left elements, in
particular Trotskyists, from its ranks in order
to move closer to the CGT. Two members of
Informations Ouvrieres. 815 March 1972
Militants of the AJS participate in the mass demonstration against Pierre Overney's murderers.
The CFDT, the Pabloist Ligue Communiste and
the gauchiste groups have tended to play up many
strike situations-Pennaroya, Girosteel, Joint
Franc;ais, No u v e 11 e s Gal e r i e s-by organiz-
ing strike support committees which, given the
lack of union strike funds, have in some cases
provided Significant material support through
national fund-raising campaigns.
The Ligue in particular has viewed these
strikes as "exemplary," that is, as strikes which
are held up as a model to the working class. The
formation of support committees, the involve-
ment of (external) pOlitical elements, the attempt
to rally the support of the population (since many
'of these strikes have taken place in relatively
isolated areas), are offered by the Ligue, not as a
sign of its weakness, but as evidence for its
theory of implanting itself in the working class by
moving from the "periphery"-some Ligue pres-
ence in marginal industries, virtually no im-
plantation in key industries-to the "center" of
the class.
In typical Pabloist fashion, the Ligue has vir-
tually abandoned any attempts at direct implanta-
tion in the class on the grounds that the class and
its prinCipal union, the CGT, are too closely
bound to the Stalinists. The Ligue makes the
actual weakness of its implantation in the class
into a theoretical virtue. It thus again demon-
strates its Pabloic;;t nature by searching for a
revolutionary agent everywhere but withi.n the
class itself, in this case through work from the
outside or in marginal industries.
The CFDT, which after 1968 attempted to
capitalize on the militancy of the younger work-
ers especially, has adopted a "left" vocabulary
and has also supported, though ultimatistically,
these strikes. On the one hand the CFDT has
urged long strikes (with no funds to support
them, thus breeding discouragement and disillu-
sionment) and on the other hand has supported
these strikes only in isolated cases, refusing any
appeal to mass working-class solidarity, which
might threaten the position of the CFDT bureau-
crats. Not surprisingly, the working class is be-
Lutte were expelled by the CFDT in the
south of France, and the leadership has begun a
campaign against the fractions of the Ligue C')m-
muniste in various areas.
The combination of the deterioration of the
economic pOSition of the French working class
and the frequently adventuristic poliCies of the
Pabloists and the gauchistes starkly highlights
the question of revolutionary leadership and of
the construction of a vanguard party. In France,
the central task in building a Bolshevist party is
to shatter the hegemony of the Stalinist Communist
Party.
CPjCGT
Within the limits of its strategic aim of turn
ing the class away from class struggle and toward
collaboration with capital, the French CP is
sometimes obliged to respond to the massive
pressure of its base. In such cases, it combines
limited actions with a slander campaign against
the left.
The CP systematically amalgamates everyone
to its left-spontaneists, anarchists, MaOists,
Trotskyists, part of a "gauchiste plot"
on the part of the government to mislead the
working class. Due to the adventurism of the
Pabloists and gauchistes, this tactic has had a
certain success. At times, however, it has back-
fired. Thus in February, when a member of the
"parallel police" (plain-clothes armed company
security guards) in the Renault factory shot and
killed in eold blood a young Maoist worker,
Pierre Overney, who was leafletting the factory,
virtually all groups on the left-some seventeen
in all-formed a united front to demonstrate at
Overney's funeral against parallel police and call
for their dissolution. The CP denounced the
"violence" of the "gauchistes" but did not 2rotest
Overney's murder and refused to support the
demonstration, which was nevertheless attended
by 200,000 people including many workers and
CP militants. When, however, a few days later,
a MaOist commando group kidnapped Renault's
personnel director in charge of firing, the CP' s
continued on next page
September 1972
Continued
accusation could agairi take hold on the working
class.
More recently, as the pressure exerted on the
CP, in particular by the ostensible Trotskyist
groups, has increased, the CGT union which con-
trols the distribution of papers to newsstands
has refused to distribute Lutte Ouvriere. As the
election draws closer, and as the influence of the
ostensible Trotskyist groups grows (as it has been
doing rather steadily), the CP can be expected to
increase its offensiiTe against these groups.
Combined with its campaign of slander and
denunciation, however, the CP has also been ob-
liged to give the impression that it is "doing
something." Thus the CGT raIled a "24-hour
general strike" for June 7 -which it itself helped
sabotage by urging workers at, for example,
Renault, not to go to the demor,stration in Paris.
H was not, in fact, a general stri;{e at all. Further,
the CP restricted the June 7 demonstrations to
the m:,st limited slogans possible-I,OOO francs
minimulll monthly income and retirement at
sixty-instead of in any way enlarging on these
demands, which had been put forth in June 1968.
Nevertheless, the June 7 action was a SUCf:ess.
After boycotting the June 7 strike, the CFDT,
with the background of the failure of its own
"radical" strike actions, attempted to link up
with the CGT. T06ether the CGT :lnd CFDT call-
ed a bigger and better "general strike"-this
time for two hours!-on June 23.
French Left
Pop Front Pact
The central element of CP policy, however,
has been the signing of an electoral agreement
between the CP and the SP. The agreement would
form the platform for a future Popular Front
government should the CP and SP win the parlia-
mentary election which will take place before
March 1973. The agreement was signed in the
wake of what amounted to a defeat for the gov-
ernment in its April referendum on the Common
Market. Although the government won a majority
of votes cast, of the French electorate
either abstained or voted no. On the basis of
those results, reflecting the deteriorating econo-
mic situation in France and a long series of
financial scandals in the government, there exists
a real possibility of the election of a CP-SP
government in 1973, or at any rate a near-
majority.
The pact Signed between the CP and SP is
much broader than the agreement which gave
rise to the election of the Popular Front govern-
ment in 1936. The pact is, all the same, a thinly
disguised betrayal of the French workers' as-
pirations. Thus, the governmental program prom-
ises not to change the bourgeois Constitution
which DeGaulle had enacted during his reign;
although the program calls for nationalizing
twenty-five of the largest industries in France,
it virtually promises indemnification; it abounds
in promises and assurances of its respect for
(bourgeois) legality, law and order, etc. And to
OCI Seeks Class Unity,
Weakens Program
The French ostensibly Trotskyist movement is
a critical arena in the battle of tendencies vying
for the ideological and organizational mantle of
Trotskyism on a world scale. The highly unstable
objective situation in France thrusts the French
movement to the forefront of the world-wide crisis
of proletarian leadership. Moreover, there are in
France three sizeable nominally Trotskyist or-
ganizations, each of which is associated with (and
in some sense representative of) one ofthe inter-
national blocs which have been quantitatively pre-
eminent in the ostensibly Trotskyist world move-
ment over the past period.
The semi-state capitalist Lutte
group, loosely associated with the British and U.S.
International Socialism groups, adhered before
May-June 1968 to a theory of linear recruitment
in the class almost irrespective of the ebbs and
flows of the class struggle, and oblivious to the
need to seek to recruit individuals and groupings
from other left organizations (possible particu-
larly in times of dramatic working-class motion).
LO was severely disoriented by the 1968 events,
which shattered the traditional routinistpreoccu-
pations of the various organizations and strongly
posed the objective need for united fronts among
the tendencies to the left of the CP. Sharply over-
reacting in unprincipled fashion, LO responded
by proposing lowest-common-denominator uni-
fication with the Ligue Communiste to form "not a
Bolshevik but a revolutionary party." (This over-
ture, perSistently pursued by LO for months,
allowed the Ligue to affirm a principled stance
by pointing out that a party must be based on
programmatic agreement.)
LO jLigue Electoral Scheme
Since 1968 LO has continued its opportunism'
economism. It has publicly offered to cease oppo-
sition to the Communist Party (i.e., to give up
being Trotskyist) if the CP would present and run
on a program in the interests of the working
class. LO's factory campaigns tend to center on
particular grievances in a way strongly remi-
niscentofthe SDS "rubber mats" campaigns. For
the forthcoming elections, LO is entering into an
election coalition with the Ligue. The two organi-
zations plan to run some 200-300 candidates
under a common banner at the national level, in
part to gain access to state-paid television time.
This is an enormous publicity undertaking, since
a guarantee of slightly over $200 must be posted
for each candidate, to which must be added the
costs of the campaign.
The Ligue Communiste is simply following its
1968 performance, when it ran Alain Krivine for
president and gained the publicity on which much
of its growth has been based. The most left-wing
extension of the "United Secretariat of the Fourth
International," of which it is the largest section,
the Ligue is imbued with latter-day Pabloist re-
visionism, whose central methodological constant
is the downgrading of the revolutionary capacity
of the industrial proletariat and the impression-
istic attempt to find substitute "revolutionary"
forces to tail-end.
The Ligue's analysis of the French situation
is that since the working class is controlled by
the Stalinists, it is therefore impossible to work
at the heart of the class. The Ligue claims to
work "from the periphery to the center," that is,
to begin in marginal and service industries (bank
clerks) and somehow organically "grow across"
("transcroitre") into the major industrial cen-
ters. Like the original revisionist Bernstein who
foresaw a peaceful transition to SOCialism, the
Ligue projects an organiC transition from a
student-oriented and student-based group to a
proletarian organization. In fact, there is no
painless short-cut to the development of a prole-
tarian base and cadre, and the Ligue's "theory"
simply means forswearing efforts at implantation
in the working class and eternally undertaking the
same type of publicity operations.
OCI Calls for CP jSP Government
By far the most serious ostensibly Trotsyist
organization in France is the Organisation Com-
muniste Internationaliste, which was until this
year part of an international bloc around the
British Socialist Labour League and which is now
the leading element in the "Organizing Commit-
tee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth Interna-
tional." The OCI is a serious pOlitical current with
a perSistently centrist thrust-i.e., an opportunist
practice. In its international interventions, UV10CI
insists it is based directly on the application of
the Transitional Program. In its press and public
13
top it all off, it even contains an anti-communist
(or, in this instance, anti-Trotskyist) clause
which promises to prosecute anyone calling for
the violent overthrow of the government!
At the same time, however, the agreement
sets the stage for a possible upsurge which
could seriously threaten the apparatus itself if
the coalition should win the election, just as tqe
general strike of 1936 began as a result of the
feeling that a "socialist" (i.e.,Pop Front) govern-
ment had been elected. The fact that the CGT
has begun experimentally supporting "hard," i.e.,
unlimited, strikes bears witness both to its need
to respond to the movement of the class and the
dangers inherent for it in this movement. In the
wake of Pompidou' s relative defeat in last Ap ril' s
referendum, he has carried out a major re-
shuffling of his government, including the resig-
nation of the Prime Minister, Chaban-Delmas,
and his replacement by Pierre Mesmer. While
the government must maneuver in an attempt to
maintain its "credibility" through the elections,
the CP must on the one hand attempt to respond
to the demands of its base sufficiently to retain
its chances for a good showing in the elections,
but at the same time not allow the development
of large-scale militant strikes which might es-
cape its control, spread to the class as a whole
and become explicitly political. To a large ex-
tent, the results of the upcoming parliamentary
elections will depend on the actions of the class
and the CGT bureaucracy when the French re-
turn from their annual August vacations .
meetings, however, the OCI stresses almost ex-
clusively the slogan of working-class unity and the
demand for a workers government based on the
exclusion of the bourgeoisie. Concretely, the OCI
calls for a Communist Party-Socialist Party
government.
The OCI clearly and consciously reduces the
transitional program to this single demand, which
supposedly incorporates the rest. For the OCI, the
slogan of a CP-SP government is the "central po-
litical question today," which "means that all the
determining factors of our policies are concen-
trated in this slogan we have to support de-
mands, but it is not the enumeration of demands
which by itself allows us to advance if we do
not have at the center of our politics the demand
for the workers' government." (Stephane Just,
The Workers and Peasants Government, emphasis
in original). A National Conference of the OCI
in April 1972 passed a resolution calling for
cooperation by all levels of the working class in
the fight for a workers' government. The reso-
lution insists that the OCI "demands no other po-
litical commitment than that of breaking with the
bourgeoisie" (Informations 12-17
April). And at a public speech to a meeting of
over 3,000 on 5 May, Charles Berg, one of the
leaders of the OCI and national secretary of the
OCl's de facto youth group, said categorically
that "the OCI does not intend to impose its pro-
gram as an ultimatum."
The Struggle for Program
The OCI relegates to a subordinate position, or
even omits entirely, the Bolshevik concept of
struggle for political program within the united
front, which Lenin and Trotsky always' saw as
inseparable from the struggle for class unity
through the united front. As Trotsky insisted in
What Next? Vital Questions for the German Prole-
tariat (1932):
"That a workers' party is compelled to carry out
the policy of the united front-that is not to be
gainsaid. But the policy of the united front has its
dangers. Only an experienced and tested revolu-
tionary party can carry out this policy success-
fully. In any case, the policy of tile united front
cannot serve as a program for a revolutionary
party. And in the meantime the entire activity of
the SAP is now being built on it. As a result, the
policy of the united front is carried over into the
party itself, that is, it serves to smear over the
contradictions between the various tendencies.
And that is precisely the fundamental function of
centrism. ft [our emphasis 1
Subordination of its full program is precisely the
policy of the OCr. Although the OCI has a program,
one has to hunt to find it. It is everywhere sub-
merged like, as Trotsky put it, "treasure at the
bottom of the ocean" which does no one any good.
During the 1968 events, when what was required
was above all a clear-cut drawing of the political
lines in order to expose the reformist betrayal of
the CP, the OCI originally called for a single
continued on page 15
14 WORKERS VANGUARD
Continued from page 16
Fake Lefts Conciliate ...
outside the hall by supporters ofthe NCLC, Sparta-
cist League, and others. Members oftheWorkers
League refused to join the picket, thereby
ing the exclusion. At a later point in the confer-
ence, the Workers League crossed the picket line
en masse after having made a deal with Some of
their bureaucrat friends to allow them read-
mission to the conference. Although they feebly
protested their own exclusion from TUAD, at the
Labor for Peace Conference the previous weekend
the WL had excluded all other tendencies from
their publicly advertised forum, "The UAW Con-
vention and the Fight to Build a Labor Party."
who declared that the Labor for Peace proposal
was the only one in order. Mazey went on
to explain that Labor for Peace is a "volun-
tary organization of trade unionists"-such inno-
cence!-and that "we're trying to broaden our
base, not narrow it." So much for the Bulletin's
screaming headline, "Labor Party Fight Rips
St. Lquis Conference"!
The Workers League labor party proposals
never caunterpose themselves to the reformist,
sellout policies of the labor bureaucracy; in-
stead they lend credence to the bureaucrats'
leadership of the unions by providing them with
a left cover. The Workers League maintains
"left pressure" on bureaucrats, who have been
committed to capitalism and capitalist parties
for decades, by "demanding" that they form a
labor party. Although other "demands" are occa-
sionally mentioned, and the Bulletin refers vague-
ly to an unspecified "socialist program" for
the labor party, these are worthless abstractions
since neither in print nor in practice does the
Workers League ever do anything concrete to
criticize or separate itself from the bureaucrats
whom it hopes will lead the labor party. This
extends to the most hopelessly compromised
reactionaries, such as I.W. Abel of the Steel-
workers and George Meany himself, if they make
the smallest muttering about forming a labor
party (see "Labor and the Elections," this issue).
The "Call For Rank and File Conference"
proposal, which was pushed by the International
Socialists and resulted in the formation of a
"Rank and File Caucus" at the conference, showed
the same method of bureaucratic tailism as the
Workers League. The proposal stated, "We be-
lieve that this conference has the potential to
begin to rejuvenate the labor movement and make
it a fighting movement for social progress,"
thus lending full confidence to a hypocritical
bureaucratic maneuver. Although the July issue
of the IS Workers' Power had demanded that the
"pro-Democratic Party electoral orientation of
the leadership" of Labor for Peace "must be
defeated, in favor of building an independent
party of the labor movement," the IS subor-
dinated itself to the "Rank and File Caucus"
and totally neglectec,:l. to fight for this demand
at the conference, The "Rank and File" program
concentrated on the unresponsiveness ofthe union
leaderships in not mobilizing' the rank and file
against the war, the inaccessibility of the con-
ference to rank and filers, etc., although it
included denunciation of the Democrats and Re-
publicans (with no alternative) and called for a
one-day work stoppage.
IS Amends Social Patriotism
Steve Zeluck, a delegate from New Rochelle
Federation of Teachers, presented the proposal
for a work stoppage in the form of an amend-
ment to the official Labor for Peace policy state-
ment, a patriotic, pro-imperialist statement which
read in part: "It is self-evident that this night-
mare of killing has gone on far too long, and that
this war is illegal and not in our national interest"
and "It is self-evident that this war has severely
tarnished the good name and moral leadership
of our country in the arena of world opinion."
Nowhere does the Workers' Power report of the
conference (August) criticize this statement, ex-
cept to say that the conference organizers "in-
tend to do nothing" to carry it out! The "Rank
and File Caucus" and its IS backers thus endorsed
the labor bureaucrats' entire program and anal-
YSiS, only proposing an action contingent upon
that analysis!
Although only about 20% of the delegates voted,
there was enough support in a straw poll for
this amendment to alarm the callers of the
conference, such as Harry Bridges of the ILWU,
who demagogically attacked the amendment later
(there was not enough support, however, to jus-
tify the IS' pompous Workers' Power headline,
"Rank and File Caucus Shakes Labor for Peace
Conference, , . "). In fact, the labor bureaucrats
might someday lead one-day political strikes, as
their class-traitor brothers in the large work-
ers parties of Europe sometimes do, but only
when such an action is simply a harmless pro-
test-an "escape valve"-to head off even greater
militancy. This is the only meaning such an
amendment to the wretchedly social patriotic
program of these pro-capitalist bureaucrats could
have.
Stalinists Exclude Left Wing
Like the Workers the NCLC blows
up its self-importance by claiming that its strike-
support proposal dominated the TUAD Conference
and was the basis for the exclusion of the Labor
Committee and its supporters. What the CP was
really afraid of was any criticism from the left
of its effort to build support for McGovern and
the Democratic Party in the elections. Supporters
of the Spartacist League, Revolutionary Commu-
nist Youth, Workers League, and caucus repre-
sentatives from NMU, AFSCME, UFT, AFT, UAW
and taxi and hospital unions were violently
cluded along with the Labor Committee. CP goons
fingered known left-wingers as "disrupters" de-
spite the fact that no disruption of the confer-
ence had even been threatened. The dissidents
were herded into a small room, supposedly for
investigation by the "credentials committee," and
then expelled. Others were barred at the door
with questions "Are you a member of the
Spartacist League?" Inside the hall, a floor fight
erupted over the question of the exclusions. Two
supporters of the Workers League got the floor
during the debate on rules, but spoke against the
exclusion of their own supporters only, ignoring
the prinCipled question of the exclusions. After
several futile attempts to gain the floor, the large
NCLC delegation moved to the front of the hall
and were physically ejected by CP goons. Sup-
porters of the Spartacist League and Revolution-
ary Communist Youth, some of whom had been
inadvertently allowed in by the goons, walked
out in protest of the mass exclusions after efforts
to raise the issue from the floor proved futile.
The Stalinophobic Nonsense
of the NCLC
The Labor Committee's response to the TUAD
events intensified the pattern of Stalinophobic
While NCLC leader L. Marcus discusses exclusion with Chicago cops, SL/RCY members on joint picket line protest both
exclusion and the use of cops within the labor movement.
Unlike the opportunist Workers League, which
wormed its way into bureaucratic favor in order
to remain in and present its proposal undisturbed
by principled questions, the Militant-Solidarity
Caucus of the National Maritime Union was pre-
vented from entering its resolution, "For a Labor
Party Based On a Militant Program," because
of its principled defense of the victims of Stalin-
ist gangsterism. This resolution, which included
a full program, stated that, "it is the reformist
trade union bureaucracy, both 'progressive' and
reactionary, which ties labor to the politicians
of the capitalist parties," and called "for a labor
party . to mobilize the entire struggle against
the influence of the capitalist parties in the unions
and the reign of their bureaucratic agents. "
After the expulSions, a picket line was set up
reflex they have established against hooligan
attacks and slanders suffered at the hands of the
CP over the past several months. This reached
a hilarious crescendo in the 17-21 July issue
of New Solidarity, which stated;
"As of the Chicago TUAD events, the socialist
movement has entered a new, decisive phase. I: I
In the weeks ahead the left as a whole will real-
ize something we and the Communist Party (CF)
already know: that there are only two serious
alternative tendenCies, crystallized in two organi-
zations: the popular front or the class-for-itself-
the CP or the :\ational Caucus of Labor Com-
mittees. I: I"
It is quite proper that the NCLC should see
the CP as its chief competitor, since their
"class-for-itself" politics have essentially the
same popular front character as the more orthodox
CP variety. The "Build Strike Support Coalitions"
proposal which it tried to present to the TUAD
conference is a hodge-podge of crackpot theories
and a denial of the fundamental tenets of Marxism.
The "coalitions" are to unite "as equals" workers,
lumpen and petty-bourgeois elements which can
never be "equal" until the abolition of classes
under socialism. The program for these "coali-
tions," which are supposed to transcend "narrow
trade union forms," is nevertheless nothing more
than simple trade union economism. Furthermore,
the NCLC places conditions on bourgeois politi-
cians rather than demanding a break in principle:
"TUAD will refuse all support to candidates for
public office who advocate wage-controls in any
form" (emphasis ours). Thus all the political
elements of the classical pop front are present
in the "class-for-itself". a coalition compriSing
many class elements, a reformist program sub-
ordinating working-class interests to demands
acceptable to the petty-bourgeois and bureaucratic
"allies," and an unprincipled conditional approach
to the capitalist policicians, leaving open the
continued on next page
September 1972
Continued
possibility of a bloc if conditions are agreed upon.
The NCLC's attempt to put together a "united
front" for defense against the CP has revealed
the same pop frontist approach including indis-
criminate appeals to all anti-CP forces, without
regard for their class nature. They approached
both the class-collaborationist Women's National
Abortion Action Coalition (WONAAC) and the
equally pop frontist, single-issue Student Mobili-
zation Committee (SMC) in this endeavor. Fur-
thermore, during the TUAD conference NCLC
leader Lynn Marcus made a personal report to
a Chicago cop who approached the picket line,
informing him of the NCLC's exclusion from the
conference and identifying the Communist Party
as the executors of this action, thus providing the
police with an excuse to raid or harass the meet-
ing! This frenzied attempt to create an all-class
anti-communist bloc against the CP can only play
directly into the hands of those in the Stalinist
parties who regularly invoke the charge of "police
agents," etc., against their left-wing critics.
At the same time, the Labor Committee seeks
to regroup with a large segment of the CP,
with which it demonstrates such methodological
kinship. The "Call for United Defense" printed in
the same New Solidarity contains the absurd
characterization that the 20th Congress of the
Soviet Communist Party in 1956 abandoned Stalin-
ist hooliganism and" 'Moscow Trial'-type slan-
ders"! The NCLC knows very well that the 20th
Continued from page 13
oeI ...
workers' candidate in the elections without a
program. Justifying this policy, the OCI wrote:
"But what about program? Didn't a single can-
didate put up by the workers' organizations need
a program? What was it developing into? In
these specific Circumstances, the development of
a program for the government of the united
workers' organizations derived from this joint
campaign. By fighting for the defeat of the can-
didates of the bourgeoisie, the working class would
have given a class content to the united campaign
of the workers' organizations."
Just, Defense of Trotskyism
When a unified campaign did not develop, how-
ever, the OCI called for a boycott of the elec-
tions, on the grounds that partiCipation in them
simply meant approving the final destruction of
the general strike.
The OCI and the CP
The OCI apparently interprets its application
of the tactic of the united front to mean downplay-
ing explicit criticism of the working-class organi-
zations, in particular the CP. Thus in the first
issue of IO after the CP-SP pact-an issue in
which one would have expected a rather extensive
critique of the pact-we read:
"No working-class organization which cares about
defending the interests of workers and youth can
content itself with criticizing the bankruptcy of
other working-class parties and opposing its
demands to theirs. At a time when the entire
economic and political situation impels workers
to rise up against capital and the bourgeois
State . revolutionary militants who fight in and
for their class cannot counterpose their own ideas
(which they continue to defend) to the search for
a means of working-class unity capable of getting
rid of the Pompidou-Chabal government.
"Of course it would be very easy for us to under-
take the 'critique' of the 'common program for a
government' But that is not our intention at
present. We have no intention of placing ourselves
within the framework of the Marchais-Mitterand
program in order to make a 'left-wing' critique
of it. We leave that sort of game to Krivine
[Ligue Communiste j."
-Informations Ouvrif!res, 5-12 July 1972
Similarly, an OCI militant who intervened at
the CGT congress in April raised several ques-
tions: the sellout of the Paris subway strike of
October 1971, the CGT's attitude to the Overney
murder, the political trials in Czechoslovakia. But
he did so without either explicitly identifying the
Congress, which was followed shortly by the
cruShing of the political revolution in Hungary,
in no way abandoned any fundamental aspect of
Stalinism. This gross political softness is an
opportunist ploy toward what the NCLC sees as
"reformed" elements within the mainstream of
Stalinism.
For Principled Defense
of the Left!
On the baSis of this "Call," New Solidarity
claimed that Spartacist had "agreed to attend a
planning meeting." No such agreement had been
made, since it would have implied political support
not only to the nonsense in the "Call." but also
to the class-collaborationist bloc and the provoc-
ative campaign the NCLC was waging against the
CP in general. In rebuking the NCLC for this
false claim (which was withdrawn in a later issue
of New Solidarity), the SL pointed out its contin-
uing commitment to the principle that all groups
within the labor movement have a right to exist
and freely propagate their ideas in public (see
"Open Letter to the NCLC," available free on re-
quest). It is the duty of all militants and social-
ists to defend any group on the left-including
the Stalinist hypocrites themselves-against any
specifiC assault on this right. As we demonstrated
at the TUAD conference, we unconditionally sup-
port united front defense against such assaults.
The politics of the at the Labor
for Peace and TUAD Conferences-WL, IS, NCLC
-all clearly demonstrated their inability to pose
CP or proposing any explicit programmatic alter-
nati ve to the CP policy. This is in marked contrast
to, for example, a speech Trotsky wrote for an
intervention in the CGT in 1935. Like the OCI
delegate, Trotsky began by asking leading ques-
tions about the real meaning of some ambiguous
phrases which are the Stalinists' stock in trade.
But unlike the OCI militant, Trotsky then went on
to pose at some length a programmatic alterna-
tive to the program and actions of the CPo The
OCI limits itself to aSking leading questions with-
out posing an alternative. When the downplaying
of OCI criticism of the CP was questioned by a
number of people present at an OCI educational
in PariS, [O's account of several OCI educa-
tionals quoted two of these questions but did not
even attempt to answer them or justify its policy,
merely st:'\.ting: "Those are the real questions.
That is the beginnings of an outline of a discus-
sion entirely oriented toward a precise objective:
how to construct the revolutionary party "
(IO, 21-28 June 1972).
It is not enough for the OCI to quote Trotsky's
calls for a Blum-Cachin government in 1935, or
to protest that it criticizes the CP privately or
implicitly. That is no doubt true, but as Trotsky
wrote in Whither France'!: "As soon as principled
political differences are not manifested openly
and actively they cease thereby to exist politi-
cally." The OCI bases itself on a one-sided al-
legience to Trotsky's writings on the united front,
including only his calls for class unity but neglect-
ing his insistence on sharp polemics against
centrists. This is evident in the most recent
issue of La (No. 557) where the OCI
quotes only from Trotsky's attacks against third
period Stalinism in What Next? and ignores his
criticisms of the centrist SAP in the same
article.
Hard Trotskyist Stand Needed
In the absence of explicit principled program-
matic counterposition, the OCl's single-minded
concentration on the slogan of the united class
front for an SP-CP government amounts to little
more than the Pabloist concept of the Trotskyists
as a "left pressure group" on the Stalinists.
Blunting the edge of criticism of the CP can only
mean tail-ending the CGT bureaucrats. By its
lack of substantial and direct public criticism of
the CP, the OCI logically liquidates its very
reason for existence and withholds from militants
the very tool they need to break from the CP
toward Trotskyism. There is at least one size-
able group in France (the Centres d'Initiative
Communiste) which broke with the CP in 1968
only to replace Stalinism with a hodge-podge of
views. Without a clear Trotskyist pole, dis-
satisfied CP militants are likely to become simply
demoralized and eventually leave politics al-
together. But the OCI does not present i:l hard
Trotskyist face. For example, during anti-war
demonstrations the OCI disperses its cadre into
15
a working-class alternative to the reformism of
the Communist Party and the labor bureaucracy.
Each by its own particular method of opportunism
served as an apologist and left cover for these
same reformist politics. The construction of a
revolutionary leadership in the labor movement,
able to lead the struggle forward towards the
socialist revolution, will never be won by such
methods. Failure to ruthlessly expose the sellout
policies of the labor bureaucracy and reliance on
a single popular issue or organizational gimmick
may gain temporary allies, but in the long run
will only lead to defeat and postponement of the
class consciousness needed to drive the Working
class forward in the struggle for power.
The Only Correct Course
The Spartacist League seeks to build a revolu-
tionary leadership by the only means available:
the organizing of caucuses and the creation of a
communist cadre in the unions on the baSis of
a revolutionary program of transitional demands.
This program calls for breaking state wage con-
trols; a Sliding scale of wages and hours; oppo-
sition to the special oppreSSion of Blacks, other
minorities and women; opposition to protectionist
nationalism with its threat of third world war;
strike action against the Vietnam war; defense of
the Vietnamese Revolution and the deformed work-
ers' states against imperialist attack; breaking
the working class from the strangle-hold of the
two capitalist parties; and building a workers'
party based on the labor movement and committed
to a transitional program
union sections rather than marching under its own
banner. The OCI rarely engages in serious public
polemiCS with other ostenSibly revolutionary
tendencies in France, ignoring the responsibility
to seek to polarize and split centrist currents on
a hard programmatic basis.
Over and over, the OCI insists that it is dan-
gerous to be "too far ahead" of the masses, and
is critical of "iron Bolsheviks" as being sectar-
ian. In the "Political Report for the National Con-
ference of Militants for the Workers' Govern-
ment," the OCl's emphaSis on unity leads it to
restrict demands to what is "immediately realiz-
able": "Of course, there can be no question of
advocating measures before they impose them-
selves on political reality as well as in the con-
sciousness of the masses."
Centrism or Trotskyism
In practice, the OCI constantly sacrifices the
explicit presentation of program to unity at any
price-even when that price becomes inevitably a
bloc. Thus, the OCI envisaged a Revolutionary
youth International, intended as a grouping in
which largely non-Trotskyist organizations ofthe
most disparate nature-from the OCl's unofficial
youth group, the Alliance des Jeunes pour Ie
Socialisme, to the U.S. National Student Associa-
tion-could peacefully coexist. Similarly, in order
to maintain for years the "International Com-
mittee" bloc with Gerry Healy's SLL, the OCI
acquiesced to a federated concept of international
organization. In the course of the IC split, the
OCI's alliance with the Bolivian Partido Obrero
Revolucionario pushed the OCI to vehemently de-
fend the POR's claSSically POUMist line, es-
pecially over the key question of political criti-
cism within a united working-class formation.
More recently, the OCI has allowed its inter-
national youth policy to die a quiet death, publicly
criticized the POR, and declared its intention to
develop a democratic-centralist internationalor-
ganization. But unless the OCI makes a clear and
explicit self-criticism of its past opportunism,
its cadres will necessarily continue to accept as
"Trotskyism" the opportunist poliCies in which
the OCI has schooled them.
The size of the demonstration at Pierre
Overney's funeral despite CP opposition is asign
that France could at any time see a working-class
upsurge which could easily out-strip the bounds
of CP control. None of the ostensibly Trotskyist
organizations are in a position to take the lead-
ership of the class at the present moment, al-
though the OCI feels it will be able to do so with-
in a few years. For that to happen, however, the
OCI will have to assume hegemony over the other
left tendencies by defeating them politically. If
the OCI is to play a part in deepening such an
upsurge into decisive gains for the Trotskyist
the OCI must, through internal strug-
gle, confront its past and repudiate its centrist
policies
16
WORKERS VANGUARD
At Labor for Peace, TUAD:
Fake Lefts
Conciliate
Union
Bureaucrats Labor for Peace Conference, chaired by UAW Secretary-Treasurer Emil Mazey.
The "Labor for Peace" Conference held in
St. Louis on June 23-24 and the TUAD (Trade
Unionists For Action and Democracy) "Emer-
gency Election Conference" held in Chicago the
following weekend were yet two more attempts by
the "progressive" labor bureaucrats and their
friends in the reformist Communist Party to head
off and contain the growing discontent of the Amer-
ican working class. The liberal labor bureau-
crats, faced with intense rank-and-file pressure
stemming from the present capitalist crisis, want
to make sure that Nixon gets the blame for the
Kennedy-Johnson war in Vietnam and for unem-
ployment, wage control legislation, inflation, etc.
Thoroughly committed to the capitalist system,
they must hold back the struggle and attempt
to deflect it into a harmless "dump Nixon"
protest, since in a real class-struggle explo-
sion, they would be swept away as so much
vermin.
The forcible exclusion of virtually the entire
left wing by Stalinists at the TUAD Conference
dominated the proceedings. This violence was
the familiar handmaiden to the Communist
Party's policy of a bureaucratic pop-front alli-
ance with the latest darling of the liberal bour-
geoisie, George McGovern,
"Pay for Peace"
The bureaucrats' and CP'spiousphrasesabout
"peace" and political independence are com-
pletely without meaning since they oppose action
toward these goals in the form of striking against
the war- and building an independent party of
labor. The only proposed immediate activity of
the Labor for Peace group was that rank-and-
file trade unionists should contribute one day's
pay for "peace activity" and lobby for peace
in Washington. TUAD sent a delegation to the
Democratic National Convention to "place de-
mands to candidates as a condition of support
from rank-and-file workers." TUAD opposes the'
formatio'n of a labor party as "not in the cards"
at this time. This is a very old excuse which
many bureaucrats themselves have used for dec-
ades to keep labor tied to the two capitalist
parties.
The talk of "political independence" really
means freedom to pick and choose among the
capitalist pOliticians and to wheel and deal at the
ballot box. The major theme of both conferences
was to "dump Nixon" and while neither conference
openly endorsed any particular can did ate,
criticism of George McG()vern was notably absent.
On the day preceding the Labor for Peace Con-
ference, two of its initiators, Harold Gibbons,
vice-president of the Teamsters Union, and
David Livingston, vice-president of the Distrib-
utive Workers of America, had joined with former
Defense Secretary Clark Clifford and Mayor
Lindsay to demand that the Democratic Party
adopt an "end the war plank." Since the Demo-
cratic National Convention many of the sponsors
of the Labor for Peace and TUAD Conferences
have openly declared their supportfor McGovern,
seeing their role as maintaining a left pressure
on the Democratic Party.
While Labor For Peace represents the broadest
liberal segment of the trade union bureaucracy,
the smaller TUAD represents the continuing
effort of the Communist Party, the most un-
ashamedly reformist group on the left, to forge
an alliance with these labor liberals. The CP,
like the bureaucracy as a whole, sees its role
as applying "pressures" within the system. Al-
though they are running their own candidates in
the election, these hypocrites are really for
McGovern; they see their "campaign" only as a
pressure on him and the other Democrats, whom
they will support anyway as a "lesser eVil":
"The CP campaign's aim is to push the entire
election leftward, to make sure candidates such
as McGovern are not allowed to abandon their
liberal planks in order to satisfy more conser-
vative supporters" (Daily World, 23 June).
It is this pOSition that holds labor back, pre-
venting it from fighting for its class interests.
It was liberal Democrats (and their labor bureau-
Left: Workers League members block hallway leading to "open" UAW Rank and File Caucus meeting; Right: Prominent
WL spokesman enters TUAD Conference after WL failed to protest exclusion.
crat friends) who sponsored the wage control
legislation which Nixon now uses to drive down
real wages. It was the Democratic Party of
Humphrey, Muskie, McGovern, Chisholm, Abzug,
and Dellums that first involved the U.S. direct-
ly in Vietnam. McGovern himself, praised as
"clear-cut" on the war, has voted against repeal
of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, voted for the
1967 Vietnam war appropriations, and
NATO and SEATO. The Democrats are a savage,
racist party which is even more useful to the
capitalists than the Republicans, particularly in
times of crisis, so long as the masses retain
more illusions about it. The Democrats' new
"reformed" image does not alter this, but is
rather an example of how the Democratic Party
superficially adapts, chameleon-like, to its en-
vironment in order to continually recreate these
illusions.
Failure on the Left
The gyrations of the labor bureaucracy make
it imperative to pose a clear-cut, class alter-
native to their sellout poliCies. The fake alter-
natives presented by the various left groups which
sought to intervene in the Labor for Peace and
TUAD Conferences only sow confUSion, further
the illUSions, and deepen the crisis of leader-
ship of the U.S. working class.
The Workers League (WL) and its supporters
presented the same proposal, "On the Labor
Party," to both conferences. It stated" "be it
resolved that this Labor for Peace [TUAD]
ference demand that the American labor move-
ment-the AFL/CIO, UAW, Teamsters and all
other independent unions immediately call a Con-
gress of Labor for the purpose of launching an
independent labor party for the 1972 election."
In typical opportunist fashion, this frenzied sect
seeks to grossly inflate its own influence on the
American labor movement by claiming that the
question of the labor party framed in this way
as an immediate question for the '72 elections,
dominated the entire discussion at both confer-
ences: This obvious absurdity is a cover for
the WL's failure to struggle for a principled
program counter to the bureaucracy's and, in the
case of TUAD, for their complete failure to
protest or even recognize the importance of the
massive exclusion of leftists.
Workers League:
Puffed-Up Cover for Bureaucracy
In reality the labor party question was dis-
missed out of hand by such statements as Jerry
Wurf's (preSident of the American Federation
of State, County, and Municipal Employees), who
said "We must talk in terms of what we can
achieve, not in utopian terms" and that workers
must "show their power at the ballot box."
When the WL proposal was presented on the
floor of the Labor for Peace Conference, it was
ruled out of order by the chairman (Emil Mazey,
Secretary-Treasurer ofthe United Auto Workers)
continued on page 14