B - The Life of the State-Capitalism Grouping

1. Education, Propaganda, Agitation: a new addition to our leadership

An original theory such as that of state capitalism does more than explain the world and the national political scene. It has been elaborated by mature politicos and it creates, so to speak, a political tendency.

Our theory had brought us into immediate conflict with the majority of the W.P. leadership led by Max Shachtman. He had, in the meantime, elaborated a theory of "bureaucratic collectivism". This theory, at first, actually flirted with the idea that bureaucratic collectives were a progressive phenomenon because the property was nationalized and the economy was planned. It became an enigma why in that case he broke with orthodox Trotskyism. Then this same theory veered to the other extreme and said that Stalinism was the most reactionary phenomenon in the world.

But these seeming extremes were only opposite sides of the same coin: the genuinely Trotskyist concept that it was property forms, not production relations, which distinguished historic epochs from one another. Like orthodox Trotskyism, it was a prisoner of nationalized property and plan. But, where orthodox Trotskyism with its concept of workers state kept veering towards Stalinism, Shachtmanite Trotskyism, with its concept of the backwardness of the American workers, kept veering toward the other pole of world capital, American Imperialism. It was governed by the theory of "historical retrogression". The authors of that theory said that the degeneration of the bourgeois society meant also the degeneration of the proletariat.

Our conception was the exact opposite. We said that the degradation of bourgeois society was due to the maturity and power of the proletariat. There were all the elements of a head-on collision between the two political tendencies within the W.P.

We had grown from 3 to 15, but we as yet had no workers in our tendency. We were, however, beginning to find our roots in the United States. We wrote Education, Propaganda, and Agitation. In this we outlined a program for the Americanization of Bolshevism:

"Every principle and practice of Bolshevism has to be translated into American terms. Historical materialism, the Marxian economic analysis, the role of the party, the relation between democracy and socialism, the relation between the trade union and the party, reformism and revolution, the role of Social Democracy, the theory of the state, the inevitability of socialism: every single one of these can be taught, developed, and demonstrated from the American economic, social, and political development. The American Revolution, the Civil War, the Knights of Labor, the Populist Movement, the Southern-economy, the tremendous history of the C.I.O.; the development of the two major parties, the Wilson administration, the New Deal, the N.R.A., the American dollar civilization, the decline of the AmericanSocialist Party, Eugene Debs, John L. Lewis, the Marxist analysis of all this is the material of our propaganda, of the creation of a Bolshevism which will break a path for us to the American masses. The ideas and principles of Marxism must be boldly and uncompromisingly presented to the American workers".

"American or nothing" summed up that section and inevitably brought us from the question of theory to the question of organization. It was entirely fantastic to believe that we or the W.P. or the S.W.P. or both together would build the American mass party:

"Groups of West Virginia miners, West coast sailors, Pittsburgh steel workers, all sorts of 'left' formations will coalesce in time and hammer out a unified organization. They will bring their qualities. Our task is to form such a strong hue as that the coalescence will take place around us, or even that does not take place, our special contribution will be Marxism and the theory and practice of Bolshevism. But to do this we have to gather a nucleus of thousands, of 75% will be American workers, men and women, instinctively hostile to bourgeois society, who are workers, have been workers and who have no other prospect in life except to be workers. They and only they can build a mass party. They are the only real propagandists and agitators, day after day".

That was 1944. When we had first clashed with the leadership and theory of the W.P. in 1941 it concerned the role of the Russian worker at the point of production. By 1943 the European masses rose in the great resistance movements to fascism, and in America the miners came out in a general strike although we were in the midst of a world war. In the same year that the miners challenged not only the mine-owners but the capitalist state, the Government, the Negroes rose up in great demonstrations in Harlem and in Detroit. But the W.P. was so bound and gagged by its own theory of historical retrogression, by its concept that the workers were backward, that it could not greet those events in a manner that would get it a substantial following. They attracted only 50 people to a meeting on the miners. They saw nothing now at all in the Negro struggle. We, on the contrary, had hailed it as a new stage comparable to the miner's struggle in its own way. This brought us our first proletarian recruits: two Negro women proletarians.

Education, Propaganda and Agitation brought us also our first white production worker.

These new worker elements who were joining our tendency were finding it difficult to get along with the members of the W.P., although they themselves, as they were breaking from bourgeois society, had been attracted to the W.P. and that is how we met them.

Among the majority tendency it all became a big joke how "only raw workers" were joining our tendency. Previously the opposite was whispered about: we were "just" theoreticians and knew nothing about real political life. The youth had been warned not to take a class in CAPITAL led by us because, it was said, we were making it "sound" as if it were a treatise on state-capitalism. Now it was "only raw workers", white and Negro, and it was the women, "just because" one of the leaders of the tendency was a woman, whose joining us supposedly made us subjects of their ridicule.

Meanwhile, it became clear that all new layers in the party - rank-and-file workers, white and Negro, women, the youth - had become restless. So blind are leaderships of small radical groups isolated from the great masses of the workers that they had no conception at all that the restlessness in the party was a reflection of the general stirrings on the outside.

But while the third layer elements were reflecting the revolt of the masses outside, the leadership was reflecting the petty bourgeois and even outright bourgeois conceptions. A head-on collision within the party was on the way.

A committeeman of a union who joined our tendency at that time quickly became part of our leadership. The analysis of the labor bureaucracy was, of course, an integral part of our theory of state-capitalism. But now, with the addition of this new leader, for the first time our resolutions became permeated with the same feeling against the bureaucracy as that which permeates the American worker to whom this is not a theoretical question but a matter of the very conditions of his life and work. Thus the new leader contributed to the Americanization of Bolshevism, not just in general but in the concrete:

"... lurking in my head, as lurks in every American worker's head, and it's to a degree you just can't explain - is this phenomenon of bureaucracy. A worker has a profound instinct - a profound distrust of the bureaucracy and a hatred of the bureaucracy that's beyond description".

So active and live is the actual hatred of the American worker against the labor bureaucracy, continued our new leader, that he totally isolates anyone who is in anyway connected with it, including also the committeeman:

"There is a sense of isolation and alienation. I mean you just don't feel a part of them. They won't let you feel a part of them. You just feel that they just separate you. The only time I ever experience a sense of integration with them is during wild-cats. That's the only time. And it'll last for several weeks after a lot of wild-cats. In many ways they will show a terrific respect for me and an admiration. But then, after 2 or 3 weeks, it completely disappears and that wall comes up again. And I've only been able to break that wall down where, over a period of years, I've been able to talk with certain workers, discuss and exchange ideas. There they understood clearly that I play a certain role in production because of the objective necessity, and that also I have certain other ideas with which they agree".

From the start what was involved in the fight within the W.P., as later within the SWP, was the total blindness of those parties to the elements of the new society in the impulses, thoughts, and struggles of the workers, especially the American workers, today, not in the millennium, but today.

Where they looked upon Romano, the white production workers who had joined us and began to tell us his story of the daily life in the factory, as backward, our leadership wrote:

"The profundity of Romano's contribution lies not in making any new discovery but rather in seeing the obvious - the constant and daily raging of the workers against the degrading and oppressive conditions of their life in the factory; and, at the same time, their creative and elemental drive to reconstruct society on a new and higher level".

This head-on collision with the party leadership which was on its way, has to be seen in the context of the developing objective movement. Toward that end we are making no distinction between the two parties.

2. The Rank and File Worker

In 1951 our rank and file voted unanimously to leave the SWP. Never before had there been a case of a split from an organization that claimed to be revolutionary which had not produced a schism also in the grouping about to split, especially worker-members, who, being organized, united, and disciplined by the very process of production, show an amazing stick-to-it-iveness to organizations which have pointed the road away from the exploitative, degrading capitalist society. We soon found out that the unprecedented action on the part of the rank and file was due to the fact that they had found their shopmates to be more revolutionary than the so-called revolutionaries in the SWP.

We realize now not only that the members of our tendency had not left the socialist movement by leaving the SWP, but neither had the hundreds who had walked out of the SWP-WP in disgust these past 10 years with, what seemed to us then, nowhere to go. It is clear now that they were rejoining their class. They were continuing their search for a party which would show them that in its internal life it is at the opposite pole of the life in the world outside, especially on the matter of the relation of the men of power and authority and the great mass of people.

This, indeed, is the problem of our age: how to keep in the age of state-capitalism the relations between leaders and ranks free from the bureaucratism that pervades the whole society. The worker has a right to know the answer particularly since it is in his own instincts and impulses that the answer lies. All that he has to do is to have confidence in himself; know that he did the right thing in walking out of the party where he saw this bureaucratism paralyzing it, and demand that an organization that claims to be revolutionary be organized in his image. To help him to do that he must first take up the objective situation, to show why his impulses are so correct and yet why they must be organized into a total conception.

First the objective situation:

"Every stage of capitalism has its own particular class relations. We are now in a new stage, the stage of state-capitalism. This stage is distinguished by the fact that bureaucracy is the only means by which the capitalist class can hold its power.

"But in this bureaucracy the labor bureaucracy is decisive. In each country it has specific forms. In the United States the struggle is centered in production.

"The workers all over the world have learnt or are learning that a mere victory at the polls or nationalization of industry is not enough. They distrust and fear and hate bureaucracy. They do not want good Trotskyite bureaucrats instead of bad Reutherite or bad Stalinist bureaucrats. They want to substitute a system in which bureaucracy as such..."

... does not exist. The only system which from its very nature excludes bureaucracy from the start is the Leninist worker's state, as we saw in detail in pamphlet #1. The workers in the United States are ready to listen to this for they understand the problems of production better than any other working class.

It is necessary to begin with production.

The capitalists are primarily interested in uninterrupted production their way. The worker wants to produce under conditions where he can decide what is to be produced and how it is to be produced, where he can do the work he likes, and the most important of all, where he knows that his worth is recognized and that he is playing an important and necessary role.

Under present conditions, the most powerful and at the same time the most frustrating tendency of the workers is to produce and to cooperate for production as little as possible. The workers realize that a certain minimum of production on their part is necessary in their own interest. They also realize that they must not produce above the minimum. They therefore agree among themselves to set such production quotas as will subject them to as little exploitation as possible. This gets them into immediate and constant conflict with the capitalist class and the labor bureaucracy which is there to keep the workers tied to the machine and the contract. The result is persistent wild-catting. As one labor-baiting journalist, Victor Riesel, put it:

"Wherever you travel you find strikes, costing millions in pay and profits, forced by the hotheads down below - without consulting the responsible union leaders - because a foreman reprimanded a man in his division; or a chap wasn't guaranteed special pay. Or someone was shifted to a new department. Or there was a lack of new tools. There's an argument and out walks the entire department, idling thousands in other sections".

That is American society today. The men walk out over and over again apparently for nothing, and they do this because they are sick of the whole system. One day, despite the stranglehold of the labor bureaucracy, all are going to walk out at the same time and then the system will never be put together again in the same way.

All this is happening in American society today, and all this was posed by Marx some 85 years ago. Marx was able to "prophesize" so precisely by the simple method of drawing to a conclusion the movement of capitalist production itself. Marx did not mince his words. He said that unless the workers, every worker, became a highly-skilled educated individual, bringing all his force and his energies to production and all other social activities, the society of modern industry would collapse:

"It becomes a question of life and death for society to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this law. Modern industry indeed compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the retail worker of today, crippled by a life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation and thus reduced to a mere fragment of a man, by the fully-developed individual fit for a variety of labors, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers".

Either the power of the workers are released from the stranglehold of capitalistic production where he is nothing but an appendage to a machine, or society will continue in its rush to the abyss.

This Trotskyism could not comprehend. In study circles it would be quoted but in life it was never followed because it was inconceivable to them that the workers could do this without being "led", led by them, of course.

This is it in a nutshell.

Totally opposed to all this is the political attitude of the genuine rank and file who comes into the party. He is the one who leads the wild-cat strikes, symptomatic of the revolt against the bureaucracy. He is seeking to build caucuses to win posts in unions. He is seeking primarily a revolutionary socialist organization in which he will gain knowledge, the understanding, the discipline and the associations which will fortify and develop him in his instinctive hostility to bourgeois society. He is serious about building the party as a basis for a new way of life. The WP-SWP were geared to demoralize him and in the end to drive him away.

He finds nothing. And limited, handicapped, circumscribed as we have been, we have been able to demonstrate that new, inexperienced comrades and friends without long experience of Marxism, trained and educated by us, have been able to participate in various spheres of the class struggle as effectively as any others in the party - in similar circumstances.

In Detroit when the pension scheme came up, the SWP busied itself as usual with the politics of a few pennies more. One worker who is very sympathetic with our ideas took the floor against Reuther. He told him: "You got $100. Maybe you should have got $110. Maybe others would have got $90. That is your affair. We are not interested in that. What we are interested in is that you have consistently given away to the company the privileges that this union had won in its early days of struggle, privileges of controlling our own production. That is what we want back. We shall never be satisfied until we get it". Reuther was driven to the defensive. The pension discussion became a debate between Reuther and this worker and went on from meeting to meeting. So many Reutherites were supporting the worker that Reuther had to say that although these ideas were correct, the time was not yet ripe.

The WP-SWP listened to Reuther more than to this type of worker. Yet it was precisely this type of worker who became an integral part of our leadership and with whom we went to ever deeper strata of the proletariat. It was this type who introduced Romano's pamphlet to which we referred to above and with which we wish to deal again now.

In the Interim period between leaving the WP and re-entering the SWP we published THE AMERICAN WORKER. This pamphlet consisted of two parts, one part being written by the production worker and the other by one of our theoretical leaders who had special training in Hegelian philosophy.

Part I was a description of life in the factory. It was a sort of diary of a rank and file worker in a mass production industry. It showed at one and the same time, the degradation of the worker by the capitalistic process of labor and community of labor between the workers themselves. Precisely because the cooperative bond between the workers themselves is stronger than this slavery, there is in the cooperative labor process the elements of the new society. Romano, for example, showed how, whenever the worker sneaks away, he investigates the other sections of the plant because of the longing to vision the whole of which he is a part; how the worker's creativity is expressed in what was know as "Government jobs" - jobs for himself on company time; and how he wants to be not a cog in a machine but an all-round man.

Part II was a philosophical analysis of the new social individual arising in the factory in opposition to the trade union bureaucracy:

"Today, in all strata of society, a search is going on for the way to create a world, one world, in which men can live as social and creative individuals, where they can live as all-round men and not just an average man. Out of this search a new philosophy of life is being created... (nothing) parallels in depth and scope the process of evaluation and re-evaluation now going on in the activity and the thoughts of men".

"If our tendency has been able to make any contributions to Bolshevism, it has been because for it the study of the Hegelian dialectic in its Marxian form, of Marxian economics, and of the method of the great revolutionaries is nothing more than intellectual preparation and the purging of bourgeois ideas in order to be able to understand and interpret and organize the instinctive drive and revolutionary insights and the rank and file proletarian and the petty-bourgeois but idealistic youth."

We had learned that in their instincts and impulses are to be found the highest social development of the day and the road to the new society. It is this conception which brought directly into our leadership the worker type and at the same time laid the basis for new relations between leaders and ranks. On the other hand, the conflict of the leadership of the old parties with its rank and file was a permanent, continuous feature of party life. This was because that leadership was insensitive to its rank and file, never understood, listened or learned anything from it and also because of their own notions of the relations of masses to parties and parties to revolution. Because they had the notion that the workers must be led they could not learn anything from them. In the WP the petty bourgeois arrogance of the leadership was not a question of social origin. The arrogance came from the concept that all the American workers wanted was life of "plenty for all", and not a life where men would for the first time be able to use all their natural and acquired talents, become truly human beings. In the SWP the blindness came from completely misunderstanding the nature of Stalinism and therefore blaming the workers for constantly "being duped". They just had to be there to lead or the workers would again be "duped" by Stalinism.

The truth is the exact opposite. It is the SWP leadership which with eyes wide open to all the crimes and betrayals of Stalinism nevertheless holds onto it for dear life, simply because it cannot free itself from the Plan.

The rank and file worker in our grouping came to us not only because he finally had a forum in which to express himself. That was good and in the types in our organization he recognized the various layers of the working class outside and could return to them with new ideas. But it was something much more than that.

He came to us because he found a grouping in which the leadership did not stop at merely recognizing that the basic source for progress of the organization, in its ideas, in its theories, in its next concrete steps, for theoretical advance and organizational method, comes and can come only from the third layer in the organization which represents the mass outside. The task of leadership begins with this. The job is to organize these impulses into a total conception, a new way of life.

The party is a whole. Politics, forces, intellectuals, union leaders, third layer. It was necessary to bind them all together. It was necessary to work out a new relationship between them and in this working out of a new relationship [... this clause in the sentence is illegible] in which all participate, the practical tasks of the party meets the nature of the epoch in which we live.

3. The Negro

All politics in the United States are expressed most sharply in the Negro Question. Politics is only a concentrated form for expressing economic relations. Both are seen clearest in the daily lives of the people.

The politics of radical parties differ from the politics of the ruling class which prevail in capitalist society. The politics of radical parties are reflected in the life within the party. The moment they deviate in any way from the strict working class position, immediately the life within the party begins to reflect bourgeois politics and prejudices.

We have described what the break from the Socialist Party meant in the life of the newly-formed Communist Party. But, just as the white chauvinist trials made the Negro feel this party is different, this difference dissipated itself when the party itself was transformed into a carbon copy of the Stalinist totalitarian party of Russia. During the Popular Front Days, for example, when it was fashionable to hobnob with bigwigs, I know for a fact that in Washington D.C. there were actually separate branches for whites and Negroes. The spurious alibi was that it just "happened" because these were neighborhood branches. With Russia's entry into World War II the struggle for Negro rights was shelved altogether by the Communists. "A war for democracy against fascism" meant that the most fascistic practices of the Southern bourbons as well as in the Army itself had to be tolerated. Negroes were told that they must forget their rights in America. This drove them out by the thousands quicker than the Communist Party activism during the unemployment days and eviction and the Scottsboro case brought them in. When in 1943 Ben Davis joined La Guardia on the platform and told the demonstrators to go home, it was in reality the end of any C.P. branch in Harlem.

The W.P.

Although embroidered in much Marxist phraseology, the Workers Party had a position on the Negro Question that was not fundamentally different from that of the Socialist Party. It was an economic struggle that would not be solved till socialism. However, the '40s differed very considerably from the turn of the century, so that in the W.P. social equality was not alone preached but practiced. That did not change by one iota their concept of the backwardness of the Negro.

This had its inescapable consequences in the life of the party. In fact the history of the WP's position on the Negro Question discloses, in concentrated form, its departure from Marxism and at the same time reveals why the WP failed to grow. This has its lessons for us:

1) From the start of its independent existence (it split from the SWP in 1940) it felt no need to sensitize itself to the fact that the Negroes were searching for a new way of life, a new way of thought and a new mode of action. Quite the contrary, it ignored this despite the fact that the most exciting event that had occurred at its first convention was the appearance of two Negro sharecroppers from Missouri presenting a possibility of real revolutionary work in the mass movement. It continued to ignore this when the most important strike action the party participated in occurred among this most exploited part of the American population. Just because this action was led by our tendency it was just let pass. Or, what is worse, slandered. In any case it never became a part of party life and thought.

2) At the same time the National Negro Department ceased to exist before it ever really got going. David Coolidge, it was whispered, was opposed to a Negro Department, a Negro column, etc. To him it was just a form of "black chauvinism". It was not necessary, you see, to go to the outside to look at the difference between the "talented tenth" and the Negro masses. Right within the party the condition was even worse. This talented tenth representative was actually hostile. Under the spurious, outworn "thesis" that only the Marxist party can bring class consciousness to the proletariat, the Negroes were told they cannot "go it alone" organizationally. Coolidge denied that the Negro was an especially revolutionary force.

"Last and very intriguing", he wrote, "is the doctrine that Negroes will be more militant and revolutionary than other people. There doesn't seem to be much solid ground under this 'race' exceptionalism... If we have in mind the Negro proletariat, how will it function uniquely. Will it be more revolutionary because it is the most oppressed? But it is also the lowest in the economic scale, with the highest illiteracy and the least organized".

3) There you have it in a nutshell: the whole bourgeois theory. Mere social equality couldn't change that concept.

The SWP

If there is anything the great revolutionary Leon Trotsky knew it was that no revolutionary party can be built in any country that is not 1) indigenous, 2) bases itself on the deepest layers, most exploited sections of the proletariat, and 3) whose leadership does not permeate the party with that type of attitude towards the most downtrodden who may be the least glib with their tongue but are nevertheless the most revolutionary by instinct.

But he knew America only from books, therefore he could not do it. For years he asked the SWP to study the Civil War as the beginning of any understanding of American development. But the most persistent subject of all because it was contemporary as well as historical and hence had an urgency for the building of the party now, was the question of Negroes. He began almost as soon as the landed in Prinkipo after his expulsion from Russia. But the conversations he held then with an SWP leader got nowhere. All the SWP knew was they were opposed to Stalinism and therefore rejected anything that the CP did on any subject. Trotsky tried to show that what they were doing on the Negro Question was not Stalinist, but Leninist, the heritage Lenin had left about the special validity of national struggles, in which he had included the Negro Question. The SWP could not understand this, not because the Resolution was originally written in Russian but because the SWP did not understand the American Negro.

In 1938, a whole decade after his first attempt he made another try to pose the Negro Question as fundamental for the American movement. This time he succeeded through one who had already come to that conclusion through his own thinking, but who soon after broke with the SWP. The SWP just couldn't move ahead.

When we returned in 1947, the SWP adopted a Negro Resolution showing the revolutionary role of the Negro in the development of America from its earliest days to the present. But by now some very bad practices had eaten into the SWP.

Although they had done a great deal of work among Negroes, the did it on the basis that Negroes were supposed to be pretty easy to get. They never understood why, they never understood the revolutionary feelings of the Negro people, and hence were never able to express them in a revolutionary way and make the Negroes feel that this was their party. This was especially glaring in Detroit where the attitude of the organizer was that Negroes only came down there because they liked to dance and have a drink. With an attitude like that it was no wonder that 125 joined and 125 left.

Secondly, just as one swallow does not make a summer, so one correct position isn't sufficient to create a revolutionary atmosphere. It happened that the correct Negro position was adopted just when they moved back to the concept that the American worker was backward. It is impossible to dissociate the Negro Question from the American Question and once the SWP interpreted the expulsion of the Stalinists from the unions as a recession in the class struggle, it meant rough going for any serious Negro work.

It was then that we saw that they do not listen to their own rank and file.

The Negro members in that proletarian center of Detroit had certain ideas on how to implement that Resolution, but they were completely disregarded.

You have to have the skin of a rhinoceros to be able to stomach some of the things the SWP does. Thus before we came into the party, they had held a convention in Chicago, which it turned out, was a Jim Crow hotel. Instead of practicing what they preached and moving promptly, the "explained" to the Negro members how much it would "cost" them to change plans now and had them swallow it.

Other Negro members tried to show that the atmosphere in the local itself was not so good. They said they brought sympathizers around and these felt ill at ease so that they refused to return again. But all the SWP could do was show them "the correct line" relations in real life meant nothing at all. As another Negro member put it: "The party has a caste system. When you walk in you are conscious of difference between Negro and white, women and man, youth and adults". They did nothing to change the relations in the party, or even to analyse them, and hence could do nothing on the outside.

One Negro proletarian walked around with a life story which showed that a single individual comprised all the revolutionary history and politics that no amount of resolutions could embrace, but he found no listeners. The only result of it all was that when they found out that he was associating himself with our tendency a steady persecution and isolation of him began that showed they were twin brothers of Coolidge.

It was only after the split that this worker's contribution could be published. We will return to this later.

4. The Women

During the war women by the millions left the kitchen for the factory. The physiognomy of the labor force changed considerably and with it the relationships in the home. But this is by no means a completed battle. The revolt of the women which began during the war did not end with the end of the war. Quite the contrary, it has intensified. It is a daily, and hourly struggle in which the woman wants to establish new relations with her husband, with the children, with other women, and other men.

From all this the radical parties were as isolated as they are from the mass movement in general. But the new imprint that the women were making in society as a whole could not leave the parties unaffected, and the struggle burst out there when the men began to return from the war and resume their old posts, even as it did in bourgeois society. But it was so wrapped up in Marxist jargon that it was not always easy to see that between the party and bourgeois society there was no basic distinction on this very basic question.

To get a concept of the smaller battle in the party it is best to see it in society as a whole first. The mass movement into the factories was looked upon with suspicion by men in the same manner as the first movement of the Negroes into industry, before the CIO: would they bring their working conditions and standards down. And just as the Negroes proved to be loyal fellow workers, so did the women. Only the women looked at the mean with suspicion too: will these try to dominate them in the factory as their husbands, fathers, brothers do in the home. They were determined that no such thing should happen.

Then the women as human beings proved to have a class loyalty, the men loosened up sufficiently in their relations to note that in fact something new had appeared on the American scene: not the women in factories but even white collar women, telephone workers and such, took to the picket line and mass worker approach. They said of the awakening of the new strata in the population: "I didn't know they had it in them".

They also didn't know that the women workers would "have it in them" to come home and wish to establish new relations there, too. There the men stopped. The woman was still expected to do all the housework and take care of the children, and stay at home while the men went out to play poker. The women, however, took their new role in production seriously; they gained a new dignity and a new concept of what their relations to their fellow men and fellow women should be and they refused to submit to the subordinate role in which they had been placed in the home, before they got their factory jobs. So where they could not work out the new relations they took to breaking up homes, even where it meant the woman would become the sole support also of her children.

The politicians thought all that was needed to reestablish the stability of the home was to give the women a few posts in the government, business, the army, and point with pride to the expanding American economy and all the gadgets for the kitchen to make life easier for "The little women".

Not so the women. They categorically refused to remain an appendage to the men. They wished to have not only sexual but human relations with them. They were out searching for a total reorganization of society. In that search some women also came to the radical parties. These radical parties failed to recognize this new concrete revolutionary force in society, but that force recognized them for it had set up new standards by which to judge this so-called revolutionary movement.

In that same period, at the end of the war, a fight broke out in the WP over their failure to grow. They looked, not to the type of propaganda they had put out which was governed by their view that the American masses were "backward". No, they looked only at the people who had carried out the line and since these happened to have been women who had replaced the men in all posts where needed it was against them that the fight had started.

For the first time our tendency, which had never paid any attention to struggles between members for posts, began to pay attention to this one. For it was clear that this was not an individual question but here a social problem was involved.

We came to the defense of the women who had occupied the post of city organizer which was now being contested. What is this bourgeois nonsense of the men returning to their posts as if the women who had done all the work during the war years were not genuine political leaders, but just substitutes? But this new element was buried in the old political terms: it is your political line, not the person executing it, which had brought about this mess, has stultified the party's growth.

Our own use of political terms instead of seeing the entirely new element - that the woman question in and of itself was playing a new role, not alone outside but inside the organization - left us unaware of the significance that women, in increasing numbers, were workers and Negroes than that they were women. One woman in particular had a special problem since she had a 12 year old child and no husband. But we paid no special attention to this problem as if, to the extent that it was not just a personal but a social problem, it was in any case unsolvable under capitalism. That is the monstrous trap that awaits all who do not see the new in a situation, and we ourselves almost fell into it.

What prevented us from so doing in this case was not our leadership, but our ranks, and especially the women. First one thing was clear. There was a new type of response to certain historic incidents which would stress "the affinity of the struggle of Negroes and women in America". The new women members in our tendency would listen, for example, to the relationship between the Women's Rights Movement and the Abolitionists, to the fact that Frederick Douglass was the only one, even among the Abolitionists, who was willing to chair the woman's meeting, as if this was something that occurred not in the '30's of the last century but something that in one form or another they were encountering right now daily, at the bench and in the home.

The historic questions assumed that contemporary coloration because of the urgency of their present revolt. What was pushing itself outward was the intensity and totality of the approach. By continuing her revolt daily at her home the women were giving a new dimension to politics. She was bypassing the specialized organizations of women and looking for a new, a total way out. This our own women were sensing by their association with their shopmates and the proletarian housewives in their neighborhoods.

The SWP

It is from these new social types among the masses outside that our women were getting new impulses. They were finding their best friends, moveover, not among the so-called revolutionaries on the inside, but amongst their shopmates on the outside. If this had brought them into conflict with the petty-bourgeois women in the WP, it reached even a greater intensity when they began talking to the women in the SWP, which our tendency rejoined in 1947, when it looked as if they were at least retaining their revolutionary perspective on the American scene. We will deal with the SWP in detail later; here we wish to limit ourselves to the climax which the Woman Question reached in our life in the SWP.

Our rank and file women first came into conflict with the women in the SWP because some occupied the same subordinate position as the women did in bourgeois society: they worked to support their men who were "leaders" in the party. They were equally hostile, however, to the women leaders of the party who looked to them like the career women in the bourgeois world. These weren't the new social types they were meeting on the outside who added a new dimension to the American character by their present revolt. Not at all. They were women with a "mission" - to lead other women. The struggle was one of the rank and file against the leaders, male and female.

The first incident came about as follows. Our ranks had been talking to their shopmates and to the neighborhood women and from them they began to get tales of revolt, described rather broadly above but very vividly and concretely by these women from the outside. One young woman of our tendency stated that the woman question was not something merely historic, and she for one was not interested in the development of matriarchal societies, but instead would like very much to talk about women of today, her revolt that is still going on.

When she was permitted to present her little talk, the male intellectuals listened, amused while their outstanding woman leader stated that the only real solution was for women not to be women. This was the very woman who, in electioneering, wore tight skirts, with a slit on the side, and advised our woman comrade who was her junior in campaigning: "You've got to use sex".

The mannishness of these SWP women, on the one hand, and their mawkishness on the other hand, was too much not only for the women in our tendency, but the rank and file women in the SWP also began to rebel. It was impossible, they said, to bring around proletarian women and have their leaders appear as anything but "exceptional women". There was nowhere a concept of the question being a social question. These women leaders had merely reduced the whole fight to fighting for positions in the party itself and accusing all and sundry who opposed them of "male chauvinism".

Some of the battles with the SWP women reached ludicrous proportions. One woman leader said: "Men and women are more alike than opposite". Our rank and file women said "No wonder, when you carry out the line and beat down all opposition, you have some of the elements of a storm trooper".

These emancipated women of the SWP had no use whatever for the housewife. When they went to see any in the regular course of contacting their husbands, the politeness of their tone had all the rasping quality of someone cutting in on a party line and saying, "Please, won't you get off?" You could actually hear the politeness it so so full of contempt. And they made much too much of sex. The result was that they came up with these types of inanities, "Prostitutes have too much sex, good women not enough". This passed as a "social" concept of the Woman Question. It was on a par with their attitude to Negro men who came to party dances. These women either didn't dance with them or put on a show. It differed very little from outright bourgeois attitude of "luring men" - to get men interested sufficiently to come to the next dance, or to go out and help sell Militants, but never to establish a human relationship. It was only natural that when white women and Negro men among the rank and file got together naturally, that the leadership always found fancy reasons why these should break up. It wasn't only the Negroes who walked out. It was the rank and file white women.

One young woman in our tendency continued to develop her entirely new approach to the question in which the original qualities of the new woman arising out of the break-up of the old pattern of woman-man relations which showed not alone a rebellion against household drudgery and isolation but the strong new ties formed with other women, the new society present in our midst. But it was impossible to bring these to fruition within the confines of the SWP. Everything was working to a break with the old organizations. We will see the new appear when we come in the next session to deal with the life of our party.

5. The Youth

There is a daily violence in the American high school which is difficult to see from the outside. A vast conspiracy of silence is maintained about [it]. The youth fight, day in and day out, to run their own lives inside the school. Teachers, prison routines, social workers, courts of law and the police, all work closely together to "discipline" these youth and teach them to "behave".

In April 1940, this struggle exploded into the great Student Strike in New York City. Forty thousand high school youth left their schools and marched through the city to City Hall. Mounted police were thrown against them. For eight hours the police tried to break them up and couldn't. The youth fought the police, sang songs, exploded fire-crackers to frighten the horses, shouted slogans like "No sports, No school!" and "Does your father work? No, he's a cop!". They climbed trees and poles, turned over cars marked "City-Official", and shouted their defiance at the sweating police. They made fools out of the whole city administration - police, Mayor, school administration and social workers.

The newspapers screamed, get those kids off the streets! It had never happened before. The papers tried to tell people that the strike was called for higher wages for teachers. But if you asked any youth why he was out, he would answer "To get out of school". The strike was a complete rejection of the school. It expressed the hatred the kids had for the teachers who tried to boss them around all day. The teachers in whose cause the strike was supposedly held, were against the strike. Every politician, every "friend of the youth" was scared stiff of it. Because no one had called the strike, on one was leading it, no one "responsible" was at its head. The youth themselves, their cliques, sports groups, clubs, by themselves, had planned, organized and led the whole business. The professional Marxists had nothing but contempt for the strike and the youth participating in it, and tried to say it was held for teacher's wages. And they wonder why their parties are isolated and sterile.

The self-discipline and cooperation of the strike, the complete freedom from teachers and "student governments", and above all the "holiday spirit" of the youth in the strike are an indication of what these youth want the schools to be like every day. Every day, inside the schools, they fight continually to change the way the schools are run. They cut continuously, destroy school property, and wage small-scale riots in the lunch-rooms. The teacher knows she must maintain the harshest discipline inside the classroom - prohibit all whispering, break up cliques of friends, allow only one person to leave the room at a time - or the whole classroom will explode right in her face.

This is the American high school today. When the working-class moves to destroy bureaucracy in the whole nation, the youth will go right along with it. Until that time, they will continue to fight the bureaucracy inside their own school, and work out among themselves what they want the schools to be like.

It has been noticed that American middle-class youth today as a whole ask for little, expect little, do as they are compelled to do, and seek a little spot for themselves in the bureaucracy somewhere. Among them the old American vigor and optimism seem dead. They seem to take little interest in politics. They say openly that politicians are only a bunch of corrupt gangsters. They are deeply stirred by the Negro question, that is known. The inter-racial nature of the Stalinist youth group, Young Progressives of America, attracted many of these youth to it before the 1948 elections. More important than the politics of Wallace was the fact that the organization had Negroes in it. These middle-class youth are not pro-labor in the ordinary political sense, but socially they are not conscious of any great division between themselves and labor. In the United States, the class struggle in production is as sharp as it can be, but in social practices and behavior there is not that gap between the classes that exists in many countries in Europe. That means a lot. For the passivity of the American middle-class youth is a most unnatural thing. They are "passive" because they trust nobody. They do not wish to be disappointed once more. They do not know where to look. They do not have that discipline, training and that sense of cooperative life which industry by its very structure imposes upon the workers and thus forces them forward. But if the workers should at any time seek to realize in life a new society, the middle-class youth in their millions will go with them and drag along a large section of the middle-classes as a whole. They too are seething with hostility against the system. The small professional man, the typist, the clerical worker, the salesman or woman in the department store, are as sick of capitalism, its inflation, its sweatshop speed-up, its corruption, its wars, they are as sick of it as everybody else. But because there is no great Labor Party in the United States, they do not know where to go. For the time being on the surface they think in terms of capitalism. These people as a class cannot lead anything. But they are ready for organic change.

To all this the SWP was as blind as a bat. It was just then that they proclaimed Tito as the only hope for humanity, and the greatest event that has occurred since the Russian Revolution - no loss! At the same time on the American scene they abandoned any perspectives for the American revolution. The drive against the Stalinists inside the unions by the bourgeoisie and the labor bureaucracy they interpreted as a retrogressionism on the part of the American working classes. At their 1950 Convention the leader went so far as to say that the American working class as a whole had been corrupted, as had the aristocracy of labor in Britain during the heyday of imperialism. The demoralization of the party came to a climax when its own caucuses in the union suffered disintegration. It was then they turned to the youth. They turned to it not because they saw all the revolutionary sentiments seething in the youth as a whole and reflected in their own youth membership. No, they turned to the youth, and without shame, only because there was no arena for them in the trade union movement. Their only point was to subordinate the youth completely to the "party line".

The concrete expression of the party line at this time came in its attitude to the YPA as a mass movement. Our tendency saw it as a movement of youth, confused, disorientated, non-political but seeking a means to express their hostility to capitalism and the war. The SWP did not understand this in its own theory and practice. How could it give direction to the youth? All that it saw was a struggle for control, a repetition of its hopeless attempt to win people in the United States by means of Titoism, and an exposure of Stalinism over civil rights. The whole thing turned out to be a total failure.

The transformation of the youth into a party branch was an attempt to keep the youth subordinate by party discipline. The unworkable result was to throw the youth into a blind conflict with the party, a conflict in which, as with the Negroes and the women, it was impossible to disentangle the political issues without raising the most fundamental questions of the life of the party.

The most serious thing of all was that the youth could not express its own original qualities. To cite just one example. One youth was quick to seize upon the 1950 strike to make a comprehensive study of the youth movements both here and abroad in the '20s in France, in the '30s in Germany and in the '40s in the United States. But this study could be developed and concretized only in practice and they were in the stranglehold of the party policy and party life. They were about to walk out of the party on their own when they saw our tendency and joined forces with us. We will come back to the youth when we deal again with their achievements and their present crisis.