We will now make a sharp and deliberate break in our story. We have come to our own organization as it is and as it proposes to function. It is necessary therefore to sum up what the principles are upon which our organization is based. By what do we live? In general, it is, of course the accumulated experiences of the working class and the working class movements. The reason a break is needed here, however, is that we wish to make clear that although Marx and Lenin have written most profoundly, we recognize that history moves on. The circumstances under which Lenin worked and from which he drew his ideas of a party have passed. Lenin, as we saw, sought to build a party according to certain principles because the Social Democracy refused to seize power. We live in the epoch of state-capitalism and, far from being faced with the problem of the Communist Parties refusing to seize power, we see them seizing power and crushing the workers movement. It is clear that no small vanguard party can overcome these monsters. Only a vast mass party of millions can. Only the workers can build such a party. If they want it, they will build it and if we have capacities and talents in that direction, they will recognize us, but they do not need us to tell them what to do. We are not telling the workers what they "should" do, but because our whole conception shows that only in them lies the future and salvation of humanity, we are telling them what we are and what we propose to do.
First, the foundations of our ideas are those of Marx and Lenin because they spoke in terms of class solidarity and consciousness and world conceptions or internationalism. But we have our own traditions in the United States.
That is precisely why we chose to make a deliberate break in our story here and just at the point where we began to tell who we are and what we propose to do. We break our story to go back over 100 years and show the roots of true Bolshevism in the Abolition Movement. This, the most amazing development of our country's history and the most outstanding example of what Marxist history knows as Bolshevism was born in America 83 years before its birth in Russia. Being American, it was no accident that it centred around white and Negro relations. It was the question of slavery which brooked no compromises either on the part of the Bourbons who established a hateful totalitarian society, or among the Abolitionists who sought to establish entirely new human relations. When we have finished telling this story, the question of white and Negro relations in the Marxist movement right here, will have an objective, and thoroughly American, point of reference. It is only under these circumstances that our own history and strivings will be fully understood, for each country must solve its own problems.
One hundred and twenty years ago the Negro slave was the laboring class of this country. American prosperity depended on Southern cotton. Southern cotton depended on the slave's labor. Of all the things wrong in this young country, slavery was the most concrete. The slave lived under the whip. He moved in the chained coffle. When fleeing he was pursued by dogs. When caught he would lose an ear or a nose to mark him as a run-away.
More than cotton and cruelty, the bondage of slavery produced the most intimate bond of the human kind. Here was the closest contact with other slave laborers, knowing one another, trusting each other, strengthening each other. Slave revolt was inevitable. For the master to keep his slaves from fleeing was impossible. When the slave came North he brought the war with him. Now it was on a larger stage. Those whites who helped the slave flee and protected him at his destination took on the same human qualities as the Negro himself.
Garrison, Phillips and others were talented white intellectuals: speakers, writers and propagandists. Abolition organization began when those surrounded themselves with the bitterly militant ex-slaves.
It was they who decided the difference between one organization and the next.
The first issue was whether the Negro was an American. The Colonizationist Society said, No. The free Negro was an African and should be returned there. The Negro slave was a Southerner and should be kept hard at work there. Garrison destroyed the colonizationists for all time, both in the United States and in England.
The second issue was whether there ought to be an immediate freedom for all slaves. Some said time will take care of it. Garrison said men will take care of it. The gradualists said the slaveholders ought to be reformed. "It is the reformers who have to be reformed", was Garrison's reply. His strength was that he always brought the question home, while everyone else put it out of sight - in Africa, the Southland or the millennium.
Anti-slavery was an ever growing war. Now layers of the population were entering into it all the time. Some began to insist that anti-slavery was the business of a specialized group of people: the churchmen, the charity giver, the social worker. Garrison drew together the different fragments of the anti-slavery movement on the central principle that the whole nation was involved in anti-slavery, however unaware of it. This was not just in his head. He proceeded to publish a paper which became famous all over the United States. For the ex-slaves, the Liberator was the means by which they spoke to each other and to the whole country. The slave-masters recognized in the Liberator the spirit of the slaves all around them who were not allowed to read or write.
Everyone recognized that abolition had finally come home from England, from Liberia, from missionary and Bible tract societies. It was the beginning of an American movement.
Others debated issues in the anti-slavery movement. The ex-slaves did not have to debate anybody. They voted not with their hands but as an immovable body. "They have risen in their hopes and feelings to the perfect stature of men; in this city (Boston), every one of them is as tall as a giant". Again, Garrison writes that an opponent "... is trying to influence our colored friends... but he finds them true as steel, and therefore angrily tells them that he believes that if Garrison would go to hell, they would go with him".
This constantly moving relationship between the ex-slaves, who were the base always, and the other layers of the movement, is the sole secret of their success. This unusual - and typically American movement had no trade union posts, no government patronage, no party favors to offer anybody. People grew in this movement at a time when growth was the greatest hunger of the country as a whole. Inside this movement, the different elements of the population were brought closest together, making for the sharpest clashes and the speediest developments.
Since Garrison's speciality was fighting anti-slavery close to home, the climax came when white women brought anti-slavery right into their homes. It began simply on the masthead of the Liberator. A woodcut showed a kneeling slave woman. It was entitled "Am I not a woman and a sister?". The slavemaster claimed that he was protecting Southern womanhood. The Abolitionist claimed that slavery had turned the South into one huge brothel. The most intimate human function of childbirth had become planned public breeding of slave laborers. The Liberator opened the question up for the Northern woman to decide for themselves. They looked into their own lives. Here too, industry had made sexual relations and childbirth the mere reproduction of factory workers. These women tied their lives to that of the slave and enlisted completely behind Garrison.
Once more this new relation broke up old patterns. Abolition had revolutionized relations between the slave and his master, Negro and white, and now between men and women. The movement broke in half. The world anti-slavery convention which forbade women's participation, saw the conservatives on the floor pleading with the abstaining Garrison in the balcony to come down. He never did. During the Civil War, upper class British anti-slavery fell apart and deserted the North, leaving this field clear for the British workers. It took twenty years to show the class issue involved.
It was Wendell Phillip's wife-to-be who recruited him to the movement. "Don't shilly shally, Wendell", she told him. He never did. He scored in deadly style on every political target. He finished up the flag-waving, spread eagle style of speaking for all time. When he spoke to thousands, it was as if he was sitting at each man's elbow holding a personal conversation. When drowned out by a screaming audience, the spoke to the newspaper reporters below him until he obtained quiet. The most social medium possible was the one for him. He believed that the man who jumped up to speak from the back row created often more interest and excitement than the platform speaker. He believed that the theatres brought out more of men's true feelings than the churches or colleges. He lived the greatest part of his life on his feet in the midst of his audience and they loved him for it. He was not an exceptional man but an American of a new type produced by a new social power. "Let no one despise the Negro any more - he has give us Wendell Phillips", said one listener. Of all the anti-slavery speakers, he was the most popular with workers and trade unionists.
The best selling book of the 19th century, next to the Bible, was a book written about Negro slavery by a white woman. Anti-slavery was the Bible of the 19th century. As a book, Uncle Tom's Cabin isn't very much and as a play even less. It was read and played countless times because it was the meeting point of two layers of the population who had never met before. The American people were reading and acting out their own lives with the greatest passion and feeling. A stunned Harriet Beecher Stowe could only proclaim that "God wrote it". With the help of a hundred years we can more rightfully claim that it was produced by the concretely new relations inside the anti-slavery movement.
Abolition was the new dimension in the American character. In a society falling to pieces from slavery on one side and industry on the other, the integrated, wilful personalities of Garrison, Douglass, Phillips, and Brown were the from of revival and reorganization of the American and his world. Only revolutionists know the quality of American individualism.
Garrison began the Liberator with these fateful words: "I will be as harsh as truth - as uncompromising as justice - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a single inch - and I will be heard!". Those who thought they were listening to one man's boasting were mistaken. It was the particular stamp of the movement towards the American Civil War. One man speaking and everyone recognizing through him the nature of their times and their own true nature.
"I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all you people at the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared for it the better. You may dispose of me very easily ... but this question is still to be settled ... the end of that is not yet". This was John Brown speaking in 1859. Everyone was listening now. In 1861 came the greatest civil war mankind has ever known.
The American, constantly organizing his own life in new surroundings, would do the same with his country if he felt he were able. Anti-slavery developed the average American's disdain and contempt for government bureaucracy to its highest pitch. "No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all".
Thoreau is speaking about John Brown and about every American. He is not afraid to draw this to its conclusion: people govern their own lives and those of that portion of humanity closest to them. Government bureaucracy manages dead things, busily protecting itself from the self-governing mass.
The future of the country is no riddle and no uncertainty. The new passions and energies could be found deep inside the anti-slavery movement. Nowhere else. That was Garrisonian Abolition.
There was no such uncompromising stand, and hence no new relationships set up in the socialist movement until after it split into two, and Bolshevism (Communism) initiated the white chauvinist trials that we described earlier. The period is important not only because a new revolutionary force was found in American society but because a new method of establishing relations, a new attitude toward the relationships established was hammered internally, inside the revolutionary party.
In this lies the total conception of the problem. To establish a truly human relationship between whites and Negroes meant not only to break from bourgeois society but to conceive and to practice the new relationships symbolic of socialist society.
It was no accident that as the Communist Party degenerated, as the epoch of state-capitalism in its Stalinist form dominated the policy and life of the once revolutionary party, so the relations between whites and Negroes appeared right within the C.P. in the capitol of this imperialist land.
But here something horribly new appeared. It wasn't only that relations between whites and Negroes reflected the prejudices of capitalist society. It was that the relations between Negroes and Negroes, between Negro leaders and the Negro masses, went one step lower than that initiated by the talented tenth or careerist type of Negroes. The C.P. spread its corruption everywhere and killed the positive features of the Negro rebellion. It created such types as Benjamin Davis a combination of a hack and a hatchetman who could counsel the Negroes to stop their fight for their rights here in America because Stalinist Russia demanded class peace precisely in the decisive period of war where all decisions are final.
Leon Trotsky had a total conception of the Negro role in the revolution, and of that of the vanguard party. For that reason he demanded not alone a general attitude, but specific, concrete sensitivity to every phrase in which any prejudice was in any way implicit. Right in the midst of the struggle of his party threatened with split he took time out to make an issue of the supercilious use of the word Hottentot, by a leader of the opposition, James Burnham. He did not mince words to expose the chauvinist implications in the use of the word, and the fact that it could come only from a party that was not indigenous and was not an integral part of the mass movement, but thought it could make revolutions from its 14th Street offices in Manhattan or the Bronx. And this is exactly what overtook his own party. This concept of doing it from the outside and from above, left its skin so tough that when it found itself holding a convention in a hotel that barred Negroes, it continued with the proceedings as if nothing had happened. To it the "theses" it would issue from that hall were more important than the example of its own callousness. From then on the relations of whites and Negroes in its party degenerated in the same degree as its politics.
When we reach state-capitalism, one-party state, cold war, hydrogen bomb, it is obvious that we have reached ultimates. We are now at the stage where all universal questions are matter of concrete urgency for society in general as well as for every individual, for the internal life of the party as well as its external relations. State-capitalism is itself the total contradiction. In it are concentrated all the contradictions of revolution and counter-revolution. The hardest thing for an old radical is to see that this means him and his party. And yet the most revolting incident I have ever witnessed occurred right in a so-called revolutionary party, the WP. This incident I shall never forget because it is an "incident" such as disintegrates a proletarian party. As Lenin put it when he spoke of the difference between Stalin and Trotsky, it may be a "trifle" but it is the kind of trifle that might bring down the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is it. One Negro member who happened to write that he agreed with our tendency committed some minor infraction of discipline. It was a question of putting down "the line" and disciplining him. But so great was the leadership animosity of our tendency, that they might just as well have brought rope and faggot. They forgot that the particular individual was, after all, just an average Negro steel worker, one of less than a handful, in a sea of white faces taut with the purpose "to put him in his place". The whole convention was suddenly converted into an armed camp. No, they had no real arms, nor sate power, but so hostile was the atmosphere, so shrill the speeches, so categoric the line, that I wondered how J. braved the gang-up and rose to defend himself instead of just running, (not running, walking) out of the nearest exit. But our worker was made of sterner stuff than these wild petty-bourgeois, and stood up singly (we knew nothing of the incident) not alone to defend himself but to proclaim his association with the tendency. The house broke loose with hysteria. Not a single leader rose to tell this dominant white society of petty-bourgeois to calm down. It ran its course but finally was referred to a smaller committee for action.
There I sat on the platform - I was about to debate Coolidge on the theory of the Negro Question - wondering what is the use, what is the good of theory when a so-called revolutionary organization can come so close to evoking a lynch spirit. This was some 3 years after the dispute around the Harlem and Detroit riots and we were moving to a showdown. We knew that what was actually involved was nothing less than the road to the American revolution and that we broke on that with these petty-bourgeois phrasemongers.
Contrary to all other radical groupings who began by issuing manifestos of what the workers "ought" do do, we took a general political decision first to examine ourselves and the history of other organizations and we said, Let us find out about ourselves. We examined ourselves for a year and a half, and now we propose to do some very simple things. They are only two in number. Nevertheless, they are totally unprecedented in the radical movement in America. These are:
One. We hold to public view not just our policies, but our internal relations: between ranks and leaders, between leaders and leaders, between ranks and ranks, between the organization and its periphery outside. We do so because we do not believe that we are immune to the prevailing character of the epoch of state-capitalism and therefore wish to submit ourselves to a constant check both by our own rank and file and also by the workers outside. They are the only ones whose role in production and hence whose mentality is completely, utterly and totally opposed to the barbarisms of capitalist production and social relations. Our relations reveal, we hope, the problems the workers themselves are probing with methods of their own. We both, in different ways, are clarifying for ourselves the politics of our age.
Two. We propose to publish a paper that is of, for, and by the workers but which at the same time incorporates within it the history, experiences and principles of 100 years of Marxism, which is the theoretic expression of the struggles and aspirations of the world working class as a class. We hope thereby that in its pages there will be a living, breathing vibrant American working class whose voice everyone abroad will wish to hear as much as the masses here. Heretofore, the only American voice the European and Asiatic masses have heard is that of the State Department and the labor bureaucrats swarming all over Europe and deceiving the workers there as to the conditions of the workers here. When bureaucrats like Walter Reuther and Irving Brown and Lovestone go to Europe and Asia they go to Europe and Asia to tell how the American workers and free enterprise - as if these two opposites were one unity - have created the most wonderful state and living conditions. They tell them nothing of the struggles the workers have with these bureaucrats right here in this country that is even greater than what the British workers have there with Atlee and their big labor bureaucrats.
Nobody has told the European workers one word about this. This is the great vacuum which this paper works to fill. We have had a little experience in the internal paper we mimeographed, CORRESPONDENCE, every two weeks. Now we are moving toward the printed word and an expanded voice.
Our 18 months of existence as an independent grouping came to a climax this January with a meeting of the leadership which was open of course to the membership. The political reports of that gathering revealed the following achievements and projects:
The Report mentioned the achievements, but spent its time, effort, and analysis not on these. Quite the contrary. The whole attitude and aim was to expose the weaknesses of the organization, and particularly its leadership. This type of exposure had nothing whatever to do with the supercilious attitude so characteristic of other groupings of "We could have done more, were it not for these obstacles over which we had no control". No, this was very much the opposite. It stressed that the weaknesses are organic, that is to say of the very organism of the party as expressed in its leadership. This is not to be glossed over and kept sacrosanct as do other radical groupings imitating the bourgeois method. No, this is to be faced squarely and faced not with an attitude of "let's do more, be more active" - considering our number, we have done much too much already - but rather with a proletarian, or if you wish, an Abolitionist, attitude of reorganizing ourselves. This means recognizing not only that the center of all our theories and activities is the worker in general, on the outside, but that internally the basic source of progress of the organization, in its ideas, in its theories, in its next concrete steps, for theoretical advance and organizational method, comes and can only come from the third layer in the organization.
It is necessary to be both theoretic and concrete. Our troubles stem from the prevailing character of our epoch and therefore we must look at that first of all. The theory of state capitalism as the theory of the modern world has revealed the relationship between the statification of production and the revolt of the masses. From that flow all other relations - between the political party and the workers, between the union bureaucracy and the mass. The theory of state capitalism could only have been born with the existence of state capitalism. But two decades before the theory the problem was posed.
It was first posed by Lenin in 1920. Three decades before it became the problem of the world as a whole, it had already become the problem of Russia, precisely because there the workers had already achieved state power, and you had to get down to the bedrock of the economy. Since that was in utter chaos at the end of a world war, a civil war, and an attack on all fronts by world imperialism, the question was what to do.
In pamphlet #1 you saw the different answers given to this problem as it appeared concretely in Russia by the different tendencies within the Russian Communist Party - the answer given by Lenin, Trotsky and Shlyapnikov. At the beginning of the section on our theory in this pamphlet, we restated the aspects as they applied in general to the objective situation. What we now wish to do is to move over to its application to workers organizations, particularly ours.
We do this for two reasons: 1) The world and national situations explain us, but we also explain the world situation. In the activity and analysis of ourselves therefore we illuminate the world and national situation. 2) It is the problem faced by every workers organization, whether it has power like Stalinism, is struggling for power like the British Labour Party, or is like ourselves, a small organization trying to clarify workers' politics.
Internally an organization has the shape of a triangle. At the sides of the triangle are the political, intellectual leadership and those with considerable trade union experience while at the base is the rank and file.
Lenin was the first to pose the relationship between ranks and leaders, as well as between the party and the masses on the outside, as a triangular relationship.
In those days the Bolshevik party consisted, more or less, of three formations:
One, the party, and particularly the party leadership, Bolsheviks, intellectuals for the most part or workers who had become Bolsheviks and associated with the leadership on an equal footing. They constituted the leadership of the revolution.
Two, there were trade unionists who were leaders of the party but they were so for the most part because they were leaders in the trade unions.
And three, there were the masses of the workers, the rank and file, with no experience.
It was posed not as a 1:1 relationship of ranks and leaders, but as a triangular relationship of ranks, leaders and trade unionists, whether or not these were also in the leadership, because with the achievement of state power there was a split between the workers organizations and workers interests.
That was the now that occurred only with the conquest of power. That was the quality that was unknown before the Russian Revolution. That is what is now known. The fact that the old radical so-called vanguard groupings still refuse to answer that question still persist in saying we have not yet reached 1917 and until we do we won't know, shows how far behind they are the workers the world over who instead ask the question: after power, what? Must it be Stalinism?
That is exactly what Lenin was warning them about from 1920 to his death in 1921. If, he said, we do not work this relationship out correctly, it is not only that the party will be in a mess with the trade union leadership and the masses. For a workers state to be in a mess on that relationship means the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is by no means an easy problem as the other two would like us to believe. It is not: we have state power, let's use it even if that means to militarize the workers. Nor is it: it is a workers state, therefore just leave the workers alone and, in effect, do away with political leadership. There were many times when the only proletarian line consistently followed was the line followed by the old Bolsheviks whose origin was that of the petty-bourgeois and whose occupation was that of intellectual, political leadership. That is because the workers weren't just the workers in steel or auto or textiles, but the workers as a class with a future of liberating all of humanity. So that whereas the relationship between party and the mass must be a correct one or the workers state collapses, the simple truth is that without a correct analysis of the internal relations of party leadership, trade union leaders and the ranks, you will never solve anything.
Lenin said that it was an undoubted fact that Soviet Russia was a workers state. Nevertheless, the workers must have a way to protect themselves against their own state and the trade unions were one such organ. But at the same time, the trade unions must become "schools of communism", a transmission belt to the party. The party leadership represents the ranks, but the ranks must have a way to be militant in expressing their attitude to the leadership and be as severe as is necessary. They must be free to say, "We don't wish to work with this and this bunch of bureaucrats". And finally the party must always be ready to submit its work to be checked by the non-party masses.
That is the simplicity, profundity and vision of Lenin in 1920. That is the problem facing us today, in our organization.
We too are divided into three groupings, no matter what the sharings are between. These are:
1) The trained party leaders, the intellectuals, the ones who organized the theory of the organization and also did the practical work to correspond to the organizing and popularizing of the theory.
2) Also in our organization there are the workers in the trade union organizations and those closest to them.
3) There is the rank and file worker, the third layer, those who represent the masses outside, mostly young people, the women, rank and file Negroes, and the youth.
That is what our organization consists of. And the relationship between them seems now to be the key to our future progress. Before we go a step further, we have to clarify, we have to clarify what that relationship is in general.
We have to recognize that it is a constantly shifting relation.
We have to learn to establish what precisely it is at each particular moment.
The layer of the leadership, the union elements and the third layer. That is what we have to learn to see the organization as, a whole constituted of these parts.
Now the leadership inside this triangular relationship has done sufficient not only in the past but in recent times to establish its claim to continued leadership and to have that respect from the ranks which a leadership must have in order to lead. It not only organized theoretically and practically until we left the old organizations, it not only led with skill the struggles within the old organizations so that we took from them everything we could and left them nothing. It has been responsible for all our projects. I don't want to take anything away from the proletarian authors but the leadership was what was necessary and took the necessary steps. The leadership has something else to its credit. Our solitary proletarian pamphlet, it had to intervene and protect that proletarian from being smashed to bits by first and second layers and even from some of the third layer. So if that pamphlet is what it is, it is because the leadership was on guard to protect the writer. So in general, both in theory and concrete activity, the leadership has shown where it stands in regard to the ranks and its capacity to guide the organization in the correct way.
It is true the leadership has these accomplishments to its credit but it is also true that the leadership is in grave danger of slipping into the same pit that the leaderships of the old organizations have fallen in. Our isolation from the masses impelled us almost at our birth to "rush to organize" the workers before even we had ourselves organized. It is true that the attempt was squashed before ever it we put into effect, but it is a fact to note, not to forget. Secondly, there was a tendency to return to other organizations for we have in our organization every social type in society in general and every tendency in the revolutionary movement since its inception at the birth of capitalism. Since this nearly corrupted a whole branch of the organization, we here print the method of analysis we used to end it.
In contrast to that we had the proletarian elements, trade unionists and all, in the leadership who fought these petty-bourgeois tendencies. But they learned more on the proletarian outside than the proletarian in our ranks from whom they were not able to elicit what the school was able to elicit.
The old radical parties should be a warning as to what may become of the layer that does not fully accept the political primacy on all matters. We had one such example in our own ranks. From the very start of our state capitalist theory I referred to Tobin, one of our first three exponents. It was not by accident that he thought Shlyapnikov right. He had the right instinct theoretically because that is what he was as a social type. He took proletarianization seriously and gave up his engineering job for a factory job. It was however not the beginning of his Americanization of Bolshevism, but the beginning of his ruination. He thereupon forgot that he was not a proletarian and that a few years work won't make it so, and he affected all the mannerisms of the "worker-Bolshevik" without ever once, however, bringing a single proletarian to the party, or even have a single proletarian speak for himself in our paper.
He was always talking "for" them, though. When the time came to break with the corrupt petty-bourgeois grouping called the Workers Party, he opposed the move. Then he decided he would take the move to the SWP but "on his own" and not with the tendency as a whole. He did come back to the tendency when we broke from the SWP, but he had learned nothing in the process, and so right off that bat began back on the leadership-anti-leadership battle instead of sensing the complexities of the triangular relationship. And of course he had to be the speaker "for" the ranks against the leaders, although he had not a single rank and filer with him. And now he is not of the movement altogether.
Were he an individual, not a tendency, it would have been sheer nonsense to take up a minute of our time with him. But although he had no one with him in the movement, he represented something, something alien, it is true, but since it has its objective roots, it will be sure to reoccur. Therefore let us consider this anti-leadership type of whom there have been many in the movement.
We are not talking of a justifiable anti-leadership feeling on the part of the masses who have had all they could stomach of bureaucratism from the capitalists, politicians and labor bureaucrats. They are the first to overcome it when they join the revolutionary movement precisely because they know it as a class phenomenon and see that it is not that in a revolutionary movement. Neither are we here concerned with the petty-bourgeois type which, in doubting the leadership of the revolutionary movement, actually doubts the historic mission of the proletariat because that type is too easily detected.
We are talking about the type, like Tobin, who spends many years in the movement, totally devoted and self-sacrificing, who has fought many a battle against Bohemianism and for proletarianization. That is in general. But in particular he does not listen to the lowest layers in the organization, or in the proletariat. He soon gets to demand some "leadership privileges", first against the ranks. Then within the leadership, he demands "equality" among the leadership, which thereby evades the question of the politics of the revolution, and attacks those who, as the Mensheviks said derisively of Lenin, will think of the revolutionary movement 24 hours a day.
This too existed in Russia. Natalia Trotsky told of one incident during the greatest period of trial of the young workers state when this 24 hours a day thinking of the revolution became working for it in practice on the part of Lenin. He had to get away or collapse under the weight of responsibility, get away to relax. He decided to go fishing one afternoon, but in the party of co-leaders that went along there was one who did not feel that Lenin should have more "his way" than others and so changed some plans to which Lenin had been accustomed. The result was that Lenin lost all ambition to go fishing and remained behind, reading, and once again tense.
This is what was the end-result of the "equality" of leadership, which is equality of nonsense, whether it actually shortens the span of the leader's life or is just a persistent reminder that "I too am here". The ways out of the movement are varied.
But our trade unionists, though they may lean towards that type, are not themselves that social type. Not at all. The whole profundity of the triangular relationship is the realization that the party is a whole made up of three parts. The alienation of either of the three formations breaks up the whole of the party and that of the masses outside. The whole point therefore is to work out a correct relationship between the three, without each of which we could not exist. The basis of our activity remains the working class in the labor movement and in the unions. To these and from these trade unionists remain what Lenin called transmission belts. In turn, it is up to them also to become full politicos so that in the trade unions where our trade unionists function they act as propagandists, not as administrators.
Once again, we turn to the prevailing character of our epoch, the oppressiveness of state-capitalism, this time as it relates to the youth, precisely because they are the least corrupted, always in revolt against the shibboleths of the age, and yet cannot escape it.
First, the positive qualities the youth have brought.
This generation of youth is distinctly different from the generation of the '20s and of the '30s that have tended to Marxism, or in any case rebelled against things as they are. It is so different that it becomes necessary to analyse it not alone in relation to other radical parties, but in relationshp to our own party. We do that very openly before the public in the manner in which Lenin made party building an open task, no only of the paper but in the paper.
Let us first of all make perfectly clear that we are concerned only with the generation of the '40s and not with that of the '30s, by contrasting the two right at the start and then leaving the '30s aside.
The locked-out generation went in for big, mass demonstrations: against being permanently unemployed, against fascism, against war. They held congresses important enough to command the appearance of Eleanor Roosevelt and John L. Lewis. This generation seems to be quiescent and is not a "joiner".
Those of the locked-out generation who came to Marxism were interested in "fundamental problems". They studied Marx's Capital, if not all three volumes, then the first in any case. But that generation treated Capital as "culture" rather than as production truths. Many of them went to Bohemianism. And when the revolution didn't come on the "appointed day" they became wildly individualistic and turned to Existentialism. Not just those soul-sick intellectuals outside the Marxist movement, but many in the WP.
We had to leave them be, and we did.
This generation, on the other hand, though called the Beat Generation, has, as Holmes has so profoundly described, "so distinctive an individuality that it has no need for imposed eccentricity". Although it sees no revolution around the corner, it does not consider itself "lost".
On the contrary it has a sense of community and is searching for a new belief that would demand total involvement.
It keeps its mouth shut now, but that does not mean it accepts. It simply refuses to take things at face value. After all, it has been used long enough and is being collectively uprooted in a cold war that is as global as the hot one was.
Even LIFE and TIME with their sweeping generalizations about 28 million youth, as if they were all one mass with no social layers between them, is forced to admit that, although quiet, it is weighing things, without being cynical. That is true on the campus, or at home, or at work, or even in the army. It is not they who are confused; it is their elders who do not know what they think.
Thus the most surprised of all were the teachers when they were confronted with the overwhelming fact that it was just their demand for higher wages that brought on those explosive demonstrations of the youth. It couldn't have been "just that", they knew. After all, they had been feeling the hostility of the youth day in and day out, and yet here was the same youth defending their rights. What scared them most of all was the doings of these youth. Here were raw high school kids behaving like an experienced mass working class movement; bold, violent, confident. All authorities - school, city hall, police - were scared as witless as the labor bureaucrats when the workers wildcat and take to the streets.
It was not just the teachers wages, they knew. It was definitely something else, they knew. But what? What was it?
This quiescent generation in 1948 joined the Wallace movement and now staged the greatest demonstration of high school youth ever seen in this country and it wasn't led by any radical group. The radical groups were as surprised as the authorities had been.
What was it? It is impossible to get the answer from sitting in offices - whether they be the plush ones of LIFE, the bare ones of the school, or even those of a radical party.
The only way to get the answer is to study those who come to you, with whom you are in contact, whom you see every day, live with politically, observe. In this respect a small movement has an advantage in that the people who come to it are not just individuals but social types. If you begin by not treating them as a whole but viewing them layer by layer, then you understand more than the few people who have joined. A study of them is, in fact, the imperative basis for working out the analysis of youth as a whole.
We have already mentioned their leader, the intellectual who had begun the study of youth movements. He is the only one who at least in looks seems to resemble the generation of the '30s: a New York Jewish intellectual. But even he isn't. It wasn't Marxian economics that he showed an interest in, as did the generation of the '30s; it was the poltiical movements as a whole, not merely the Marxist one but the Hitler totalitarian one as well.
The ranks to were of different layers. The proletarian one did not turn to the labor movement, but to a layer with whom he had had contact as a kid and which had never been touched by radical groupings: the gangs. The student strike revealed how organic to this generation of youth was organization. No one had to teach them that. They knew it long before they reached high school, as grammar school kids in gangs. This feel for revolt, and organization characterized the youth, including the middle class youth.
There was a proletarian young woman who did not let them lose sight of the negative aspect of gang-type of youth since she had seen the zoot suiters come in as strike-breakers in her shop. She wrote a piece "There are Youth and There are Youth" for the youth section that gave it a new direction. This paper, with all of its failures, is as different from the youth section in old radical papers as life is from these.
One young women with a parochial school training began to look at youth differently and her analysis of dope addiction even among grammar school kids turned their attention to a much younger layer. As a result, a 12-year old Negro girl from the slums of Harlem was brought around to the organization.
These new qualities that they brought with them are now reaching one stage of concretization in the publication of two pamphlets: one, a youth's own account of his rebellion, at home, in school and life in youth house; the other, a study of the student demonstration, not as a political analysis so much as a record of doings.
Nevertheless, our youth is in a crisis. And it is this we must analyse. If there is one thing our one year's independent existence has taught us, it is that the problems of the epoch and the problems of the organization cannot be separated.
Their leader is young, 19. He has not had a chance to be corrupted. He had not had any opportunity to get tired (although leadership of the party did their best to make him so). He is active, energetic.
He has no material basis for bureaucracy. He has no aspirations to be a great leader. Nevertheless at the School which the leadership organized, it came out that after a year of his leadership the other members of the Youth could sum up their experience with him under the phrase "Reign of Terror".
He put nobody in jail. He couldn't. He banished nobody. Nevertheless at meeting after meeting they were conscious that they were being subjected to a harsh and unmitigated tyranny.
Why?
Simply because that is the prevailing character of society today.
It is not in his psychology nor in any tendency to dominate or any of that sort of psychological nonsense. In every sphere of society capitalism has reached the stage where all leadership is organized and dominating. You vote and having voted, you sit down and wait to see what they are going to do for you. It is so in society, it is so in the unions, in all sorts of political life. We didn't have to learn that.
We are all that way, all the intellectuals are that way. The only ones who are not that way are the workers on whose back all this domination and organization takes place.
He knew no other way except to get the line and to bring it; and the ranks, having heard some attacks on anti-leadership, didn't want to show petty-bourgeois indiscipline. Between them both they reached the impasse.
First there is the domination in society. Then there is the experience of the SWP. Above all, there is the isolation from the masses. That is what sent the old organizations to their doom.
Now this exposure of the reign of terror was not undertaken for exposure's sake, nor yet to say; Well, if even this uncorrupted youth could not escape the corruption of the age, who can escape it? We have not ignored personal responsibility either. What we have done here is to bring it into the open so that we can test the solution, which (1) does not lie either in proclaiming the character of the age nor in making the youth the scapegoat, (2) Rather, the relationship between the epoch and the youth will lead (3) to a conception of the party as a totality. The party is a whole composed of the three formations of leaders, unionists and youth, in which each in turn is compose of various layers. It is never a question of individuals, but of social types, layers, tendencies, and trends.
The party is a whole and the relationship between its parts is a marriage without the possibility of divorce or separation, not because of Catholic rites but because therein alone lies movement forward for the organization. The task of working out the relationship is task not of the leadership alone, but of the ranks as well. It is a relationship, moreover, that is not a static one, but a continually shifting one, and to know what it is concretely at each precise stage is to prepare oneself for the rapidly shifting relations when the struggle of the working class becomes total.
It is precisely because we were turning to the masses by preparing to come out with a printed paper and some documents telling who we were that the idea of our School originated.
We had decided that although we had a basic proletarian theory, the only way that we could know what the workers wanted, was to ask the workers in our organization what they thought. That is the way the idea originated, of a school where the pupils would teach the teachers instead of the teachers the pupils. It was a school primarily for the third layer to express itself. If it happened that internally too, some problems such as the reign of terror were revealed, that we had not known, it only proves once again the close relationship between external and internal problems.
The idea was to write what we have to say in a way that the workers will be able to read from cover to cover. That means that what you have to say is what workers want to hear. When that is done workers will be able to see that there are people who understand politics and the politics is something that corresponds to actual life.
We have to prepare a way out to the working class. We sent for our rank and file to come to the School and teach us something. They taught us not only politically but organizationally. But that is not sufficient.
We have to go somewhere where we can feel the American working class day by day, and be close to those members of the organization who live and work among the workers. We move to the labor center. The intellectuals, the Bolsheviks, the center is going to take the first big step towards creating a leadership in which the union elements, men already proved as leaders of workers, will begin the task of becoming party leaders. Politics, forces, intellectuals, union leaders, third layer - we have to bind them all together. The test of it all will be the paper.
Internally, the test is how thoroughly the leadership bases itself on the third layer.
The youth leader says, I don't know what to do. I listen but I do not know what to do.
What to do?
We have to recognize 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 only come from the third layer in the organization.
It is a very difficult thing to accept. It is a terrific struggle to prevent the intellectuals imposing their ideas and knowledge and experience and everything else upon the proletariat in the organization. Until we clear that away, we are not going to burst out into the new.
Once the third layer accepts and understands the role of leadership there must be in it the militant determination to express itself and challenge the leadership on what it wants to say, and how it wants to say it. There must be no more Reigns of Terror. "Reign of Terror" is a phrase we are using because we all understand what it means. It can be called: intellectual domination.
We have to make up our minds to get that correct relationship between the leadership and the ranks. That is a marriage without any possibility of separation or divorce.
Of course we have the same ideas and belong to the same grouping. We are not trade union bureaucrats. We are bound together by profound ideas. Yet on this issue fundamental class attitudes are involved.
The future of the organization in theory and practice must rest upon the impulses that come from the third layer. We know it in theory particularly when we were denouncing the old organizations for not doing it. But when it comes to ourselves it is something a little harder to understand. It is not what a worker says. A worker says nonsense as much as anybody else. It is that he is judging from a certain position in society and he has certain aspirations, impulses which nobody but himself can have because nobody lives where he lives every day. Furthermore our workers are not ordinary workers. They are the best type of workers because they have got rid of subservience to bourgeois society. So they are in absolute opposition to it, whereas with the ordinary worker, his instincts are covered over with all sorts of bourgeois ideas. With a class conscious worker, on the other hand, his ideas flow freely, if he is sure that he will get a reception.
And those views are the most precious views in the world, wrong as they may be at times. Those coming from the mass are the basis of a new society.
Upon becoming independent the most important political decision we made was to issue our paper on a decentralized basis. The paper was not to be done at the center except for the editorial. Each local was to be responsible for the writing and production of a section of the paper. It is clear now that if our CORRESPONDENCE Every Two Weeks has existed this year and a half, it is precisely because of this decision. We could break thus sharply with the old tradition of a few people at the center concentrating in their hands the writing and editing of the paper because of our complete confidence that the ranks were perfectly able to do what the leadership had decided was its job alone. Thus the decision to decentralize the production of the paper was part and parcel of our concept of proletarianization - of what a workers' paper and a workers' party are like.
The very fact that the ranks were to write resulted in a new method of writing. In opposition to the style of bookish intellectuals writing for workers, which characterized the old radical press, our paper would be characherized by the style of one worker writing for another. The very principle by which we set out to write our paper became the most popular expression at the School of the Third Layer. It was: what an intellectual needs at all time is a full fountain pen.
We had before us the horrible example of the papers of the old radical organizations. Trotsky himself made the most devastating criticism of the Trotskyist paper: "As it is", he wrote, "the paper is divided among various writers, each of whom is very good, but collectively they do not permit the workers to the pages of the Appeal. Each of them speaks for the workers (and speaks very well) but nobody will hear the workers. In spite of the literary brilliance to a certain degree the paper becomes a victim of journalistic routine. You do not hear at all how the workers live, fight, clash with the police or drink whiskey. It is very dangerous for the paper as a revolutionary instrument for the party. The task is not to make a paper through the joint forces of a skilled editorial board, but to encourage the workers to speak for themselves".
Every since 1947 we had been moving in that direction. During the intervening period between the WP and our re-entry into the SWP we issued a weekly BULLETIN which was primarily written by rank and file workers. There had never been anything like that in the United States. This was in absolute opposition not alone to the orthodox Trotskyist press, The Militant, but equally to Labor Action, paper of the Workers Party. That paper was governed by the conception that the American workers were backward and it was the task of the leadership to "popularize" Marxism. The popularization consisted of the editors talking down to the workers even as the leadership spoke down to the ranks inside the party. This was done with typical petty-bourgeois arrogance, with the inevitable result that the activity around the paper - distribution of a million in a single area - was as barren of results as the articles in the paper were of content.
Looking back through the radical press it was clear that there had in fact been only one instance when the radical press caught the spirit of the American working class. That was the early days of the Daily Worker in the '20s when it first discovered in the "Letters to the Editor" the elemental force of the working class itself. These letters not only introduced news not covered by the bourgeois press. Above everything, they reflected attitudes that only the workers themselves could describe, because only they felt the total hostility to the capitalist class and its decadent order. In truth, this meant not only that the style of the paper was different, but that the activity of the party itself changed. Where it was to be distributed, how it was to be done, what it is that would form the basis of conversation with your fellow workers to whom you gave or sold it - all these changed with it. There was thus no division between the activity of the paper and the activity around the paper. The paper was best when it dealt with something in the worker's life. The activity was best when the paper was best. The paper and the activity converged into new contacts and new strata of population - Sundays among Illinois miners, Mondays at the International Harvester plant in Chicago, or Saturdays on the South Side - all this activity was in rhythm with the aspiration we had in those days and the conception that the American workers were ready for a new society then.
Along with the offices of the Communist Party and its organizational practices, the Daily Worker soon came to its degenerated end. It was governed by the Stalinist totalitarian concept and went on pounding a line - a line set moreover in Moscow over which neither the American nor the Russian workers had anything to say. It meant the death of any workers press in this country.
Yet American society is charged with social dynamite. The labor leaders have to fight these workers. If they don't, they are lost. The cleverest of them is Walter Reuther whose life is divided into three parts: in his office, in Washington, and on the plane or train to and from Washington. As with every labor bureaucrat, his main point is that the workers are not ready, not yet advanced enough. In reality he and his machine are the greatest obstacles in the road of the workers in the United Auto Workers. Let me take a second to show this to you on the Negro question. It is on record that when the CIO was formed, it was the rank and file white workers who went to the Negro workers and by frank discussion, social intermingling, etc., won them to union solidarity. The bureaucrats hesitated and lagged behind. Today Reuther will talk by the hour to a Washington Senate Committee about the evils of discrimination. He has a propaganda department headed by a Negro which periodically publishes anti-discrimination sentiments. But the machine has the whole UAW working class paralysed by its refusal to lead the struggles in the plant. Any serious struggle in the plant automatically brings racial solidarity. But paralysis of struggle in the plant forces the workers to accept, and make even some of them take advantage of, the racial antagonism, which the company uses day and night. So that the reason why the promise of the CIO to abolish racial discrimination has not gone beyond its wonderful beginning is due directly to the reactionary policies of the labor bureaucracy, not merely on the Negro question, but on the situation of all the workers in the plant.
That then is the political alignment in the United States - the rank-and-file workers against the labor bureaucracy which is the main support and defense of capitalism, and the whole bureaucratic apparatus which it uses against the people. Analyse each bureaucracy specifically and you find the key to the political situation in every country. In Britain, as I see it, your task is to analyse the relation between the octopus of Labor Party, unions and cooperatives, and the stranglehold they have on the working class. In the United States, the American worker has another problem. He has had over a century of experience of democratic politics. He has been trained and disciplined in the most advanced and therefore the most savagely exploitative industrial machine in the world. If he makes a little money, he pays for it in the intensity of his exploitation. And today he is revolting against the productive system itself and directly against the bureaucracy. It is the most dangerous situation in the world. For the labor bureaucracy in the United States has not great union or political machine. American workers have not the years of habitual subordination to a labor apparatus. The labor bureaucracy here is feeble beyond belief. That explains the frantic reaction of the American government and the ruling class. Churchill knows he can depend on the labor bureaucracy to keep the workers in England in order. The American bourgeoisie cannot depend on the American labor bureaucrats. The situation in the United States is tense beyond belief.
Yet there is no workers press to express all this. The trade union papers are worse, if that is possible, than the radical press. They are as far away from the workers' lives, thoughts, and activity. There are workers who refuse to pay union dues until the union consents not to send him that paper which has as little connection with his life as the house organs of the companies.
We have to view the decision to issue a paper on a decentralized basis and to be written mainly by our ranks from two aspects: 1) the demand it be made upon all of us to recognize that the workers live a life of their own and have their own views; and 2) what was our specific function if it was not - as it most certainly was not - "to organize" and "to lead"? The paper would most certainly not "set a line" the way the old radical press did it - in truth, it was the function of the paper to express the total indecency of the old radical press and its conception of "politics". In absolute opposition to that it would project the idea of a new society, the elements of which exist right here and now in the relations among workers, their hostility to the society that exists, their struggle for a new form of society.
The most important thing, therefore, was to recognize that the workers are thinking their own thoughts. How could it be otherwise? The proof stares us in the face. Suddenly after nearly three hundred years of continuous struggle all over the world and great victories for freedom of speech and free dissemination of ideas, the world seems to have turned its face and its feet backwards. Great organizations and great states arise whose avowed purpose is to prevent the utterance or the circulation of one single idea which they do not approve. America is no exception. In this country today there is more fear and terror about criticizing the government than at any time since the beginning of Republic. What is happening is that the ruling classes everywhere are are engaged in a desperate struggle to distort, confuse, and if necessary, totally suppress these ideas. But to suppress them, they will have to destroy the system of production itself, for it is this that gives rise to them. And the closer people get to thinking their own thoughts, the more savagely the ruling class seeks ways to crush them . The labor bureaucrats therefore are very circumspect in what they do and say, not because the people are backward, but precisely because the people are so advanced. The truth is that there is no anti-war propaganda precisely because the people are so anti-war that on one dares to say anything which might unloose that mighty torrent. That is the United States today.
This is the United States that every American worker recognized. This is the United States that the European worker does not know exists.
Nothing - nothing - will make a bunch of European workers - in England especially - so conscious of the lies and continuous fraudulence of the American bourgeois propaganda as the actual existence of a periodical which at fixed and recurrent times brings the view of the section of the American working class to the proletariat of the United States and elsewhere. A book, a pamphlet - all these things do wonderfully well, but there is nothing like a paper for genuine education.
The ultimate success of the paper will depend upon the fact that the periphery as well as the ranks of the organization will keep the paper going. Nevertheless the ranks of the organization have got to make up their minds to take the publication of the paper, the writing of the articles, and the editorial work of the paper with utmost seriousness. That is their present function. Their business at the present time is not to think about leading the proletariat - that comes up as it came up in W.Va., and we will know how to act. Their business is to live the life of the proletariat, to live the life of the organization and be able to translate this into such form as will constantly increase and develop the ideas of the organization and its influence among the workers.
They have to understand that this is no task for intellectuals as such. It is a task for workers. It is going to be a tremendously difficult task to educate the organization so that the rank and file take the responsibility for the paper and for them to realize that in order to learn to formulate their ideas in an organized way, they are advancing the class struggle at home and abroad.
This then is the second aspect of the paper. In opposition to the old radical press which was a press written by intellectuals "for" the workers, ours would be a paper written by the ranks for the intellectuals and the advanced workers. Our school was a school of the third layer to teach the leaders; now the locals must teach the center to edit the paper. We have made a few steps in that direction, but we are a long way from having achieved it. To assure its achievement with the printed paper, we must therefore go into great detail.
Somewhere among a very active and lively rank and file writing for the paper and writing about what he knows is the outline of the new style and new context we are searching for. It has appeared in our pamphlets. How is this achievement of the third layer to be recognized by the local, to be organized, and then to send on to the center where the paper will be printed, where the final decisions will be made, and yet where the organization remains the editor?
First and foremost the question of the paper is our central activity. This means the question of shop reports, reports by intellectuals, local issues aren't just thrown into the meeting, as a sort of addendum. No. When the local meets, this is its central activity. The reports are discussed, and analysed and sifted there. There the decision is made as to what is to be written up, who is to write it, what is to be sent to the center. This becomes the life of the branch and the whole branch is involved.
That's where our activity begins, first with ourselves, the three layers in our organization, and the total picture emerges. The preparation for this week by week becomes the axis of our activity and everybody discusses the form the material is to take - whether it should be taken up by a columnist, in an editorial, as an anecdote. Straight articles, interviews, brief editorials, news stories, full-length editorials - from the very beginning the local not only offers the material to the center but decides the form it is to take. All the various forms of journalism are to be discussed at the branch. Otherwise there is no paper.
Publishing a paper is no amateurish job. That is the basic conception. The locals needn't always write it themselves, but they have to decide. The organizer is to guide, to elicit, to be aware and study the paper as a whole and help the branch in the discussion, but by and large they will be the editors.
Take a national issue like the steel strike. If everybody writes about it, not only the steel workers (those we have contact with) and not only the other workers we have contact with, say what they think. But also the petty-bourgeois professor with the response of his colleagues, the office girl with the response there, the periphery that is around our organization - whether housewives or other strata of the population - all say what they think. Somewhere there, in what they will do, is a solution to the problem.
The function of our organization is to clarify workers' politics. We stand for a new form of society. There is a very fundamental question here in how this is reflected in the paper. It is true that the paper does not set the line in the sense of program, what the workers are to demand, what they should do in each specific instance, as people do not set themselves up as leaders. But our paper has a line and the difference between the line which flows from those who think of themselves as the leaders and our line in the sense of a body of ideas, doctrines, etc., is that we are to clarify workers' politics and extend them.
We don't only talk and listen to workers; we introduce subjects to workers. We have to get rid of this dashing down of articles and sending in and putting them into the paper. There is no objection to articles being dashed down, but the branch must see them, must have an idea of what is going on, of what is good style, what is not. For example the question was raised of going into a workers' milieu, of going but not knowing what to do. First they listen; then when they have listened for a while and don't know what to do, they get the idea of the old organization, that they have to politicize, to put our stamp on it.
What we have to do is to give form to the ideas of the workers. What appears in our paper is not the same thing as the workers says or merely a condensation of what he says. It is organized and formulated, pointed and sharpened. Then the worker recognizes what exists and what he thinks and what he does in a form that gives his impulses and instincts logical organization. And with this logical organization of his impulses and instincts and desires, the impulses, instincts, and desires are no longer what they were before, but have achieved a new quality. And that new quality is what we have to give it.
Every local meeting, every local member must begin to feel himself not an ordinary worker, but a vanguard in that sense. That is not politicalizing what the workers say. It is something much more profound and difficult.
This is going to put an end to the problem of "milieu". We go to the milieu, yes, but we have to make something of what the worker says and does there. That is what the plenum report tried to say. What the third layer, what the workers say, has to be organized and given form. It is not a literary question, or a question of style. It is a certain literary result. But first and foremost, it is organized and given form, the form which we as people who stand for a new society have and which first and foremost the average rank and filer in our organization has.
The fundamental thing to recognize is that the impulse, instincts and desires of the workers, from the mere fact that they are instinctive, are entangled and permeated always with bourgeois ideas. The problem is how to tear the revolutionary impulses out of this contradiction. And every member of the organization must be aware of what is taking place and be able to see also into the ultimate logical conclusions of what the workers are saying. We have to draw it to that end very boldly. We have to learn to do that. We can't depend on the workers doing that.
Editorializing is one of the most difficult jobs of the day. You can achieve editorial effect in various ways. You can achieve it by mass - i.e. you give a whole mass of material of a certain kind, just pile it up. You can achieve it in a more subtle form, by variety, anecdotes, letters to the editor, editorial, news story, all dealing with the same subject more or less from the same point of view. Or at a certain stage you take a whole mass of material, take five or six pages of the paper, and you have a whole mass of correspondence which you deal with. You stimulate correspondence. Or you deliberately pose opposing views, ideas you think are entirely wrong.
And then every local is handling this on three levels:
An editorial gives a framework so that the tumultuous varied expressions are not without some sense of direction. It is a sort of political guidance from the leadership to the ranks and to the periphery. But it would be false to think that the editorial is the summation of the paper.
The whole point is that everybody has to edit the paper. A branch meeting must be a combination of the reporters and the editors. A printed paper has to be done from the center of course. The final decisions are made there. Some of the comments and various things that come in aren't just dumped in. It isn't a question of manipulating or shaping the paper, but we have to begin to edit the paper. We have in mind the current issue and the next few issues as well as what has been in the paper. We all have to do it. The organization is the editor. It has to learn what editing is. That is what we are all going to become - editors. We are going to learn to edit a paper.
Last updated on 09 January 2026