Fw from David McR: "Thinking the Unthinkable", comments on socialist unity

----- Original Message ----- 
From: David McReynolds 
To: Scott McLarty 
Sent: Wednesday, June 05, 2013 11:09 AM
Subject: Re: "Thinking the Unthinkable", comments on socialist unity


Scott- I think you already got this when I sent it to the Green list, but wanted to make sure. This goes to my "Edgeleft" list not in the usual format and I know some of you are on other lists of mine and have already gotten it. Clearly anyone getting these comments can pass them on without further permission to anyone they want to. (And Bruce I hope we can put them on the Edgeleft site).

I had a note from Mark Solomon who caught me up on one of those errors all writers seem to make, and why proof readers earn their pay. His article was not titled "whether" the socialist left, but whither. I was surprised I made that error because when I saw Mark's original title I thought "whither" sounded more 19th century than 21st  - but then went right ahead and changed a single vowel by accident.

Much more important, Mark felt people might take his paper for a document from CCDS - he told me it appeared first on Portside. I won't quibble too much, though it is a kind of quibble, since Portside is a project of CCDS (and an excellent project - I often forward material from them). My memory is that I got it originally as a document on the CCDS list serve, along with a later note on a special site of CCDS where further discussion could take place. No matter - this was not a document from CCDS, nor did I suggest it was, but a statement from Mark Solomon.

I should also clarify that I wasn't miffed that the Socialist Party wasn't invited to have a speaker but rather, that in the discussions that had involved the groups meeting tonight there had been no outreach to the SP. That may well be a comment on the failure of the SP.  With all those "preludes" to my own comments it would be easy to lose track of a simple fact - I am excited by the forum taking place tonight, I view it as the first of many steps needed, and wish it every possible success.

David




  In March of this year Mark Solomon, past national chair of the United States Peace Council and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, circulated a paper to members of CCDS, "Whether the Socialist Left? Thinking the 'Unthinkable'". The paper, with a large number of comments,  has led to a forum scheduled for tomorrow night, which will have speakers from the Communist Party, Democratic Socialists of America, Jacobin Magazine, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and chaired by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

  The response has been exciting and led to the meeting being shifted to a larger venue. I regret, deeply, that a conflict with an event by War Resisters League, makes it impossible for me to
  attend. However these comments are being sent to several of my lists.

  I would welcome responses from any of you who feel moved  - I'd particularly like to hear from those of you who are members of the Socialist Party.  While I am sorry no one touched base with the Socialist Party, it is also possible that the SP did not fit the guidelines intended by Mark Solomon's paper.

  My first response is rejoicing that a long-standing barrier has been laid aside - that which assumed that direct dialogue with the Communist Party was off-limits. The anti-Communism which has infected much of the American Left has been corrosive. It is not that the hostility to the Communist Party did not have valid roots in the past, when the CP took its line from Moscow, and when the assumption of the Communist Party was that anyone who opposed it was the enemy. I remember at UCLA one young Communist challenged me, saying "the reason we know you are an agent of the State is that you folks are saying much more radical things than we are - and you aren't being arrested".  I remember how the CP cell at UCLA told their contacts not to attend social events at my beach shack in Ocean Park (no hot water, no shower) because I would report them to the FBI.

  Yes, and those memories date from the early 1950's, decades ago. I remember in the mid-1950's meeting with Dorothy Healey of the Communist Party (and a Smith Act victim) and Harper Poulson, editor of the People's World, the West Coast CP paper, for dialogue. I remember the effort of A. J. Muste to set up dialogue in the late 1950's when he launched "Socialist Forum - for Socialist Education". 

  Even those names will not be known to most of you, and at 83 I'm already older that Muste, my primary mentor, when he died. Is there anything an old radical can say that will be of help? Sadly one of the things that must be said is that, in one sense, none of this makes much difference. That DSA would agree to be on the same stage as the CP is exciting - but not really important. None of our groups are very strong. The Socialist Party has between 500 and 1,000 members (I don't have the current figures), DSA claims a larger membership but in terms of its active members I don't think it is much larger. I won't guess at the figures of the CP, but I know it is very small compared to the days of its glory when it counted several thousand members. I say "in one sense none of this makes much difference" with sadness, not joy. All of these groups - and I belong to three of them, the SP, CCDS, and DSA - have good people, committed and hard working people, but the 
  reality is that none of these groups plays a key role in the profound social crisis this country
  is in.

  I sensed, in Mark Solomon's paper, a hunger for a new socialist organization, a unity of some kind, which could leap over the problems we face. Yet, this was precisely what CCDS had hoped for at its founding, and which it has failed to achieve. And I felt there was a failure in his paper
  to recognize that one of the problems of the past decades was the fact the Communist Party
  had not played a genuinely independent role. I don't say this to score points, but to make a point. When, at the urging of my friend, the late Gil Green, I went to the Bay Area for the founding conference of CCDS, I was moved by Herbert Aptheker's remarks - as was the entire audience, which gave a standing ovation - when he said, regarding the past of the CP, "We have not confronted errors of analysis, but lies. We have not seen unfortunate mistakes, but crimes".

  And to turn to the socialist side, from which DSA and the SP come, the greatest mistake of my political life was to persuade the Socialist Party, in 1958, to bring in Max Shachtman and the Independent Socialist League. I had believed that Shachtman, and his members, which included Michael Harrington, had truly left their Leninist days behind, had abandoned the vanguard theory. If I was wrong, so, it must be said, were most of Shachtman's own members. Nothing quite prepared us for Shachtman's takeover of the Socialist Party, and his positioning himself in the right wing of the Democratic Party, giving support to the Bay of Pigs, and to the criminal war in Vietnam. DSA itself emerged in a revolt against Shachtman, when Harrington and those closest to him set up DSA. So if I chide Mark Solomon for not dealing more fully with the past, I do not exclude myself from blame. I had thought - and those around me thought - that when the ISL came into the Socialist Party we could bring in those leaving the Communist Party (the Gates
  group), bring in independent socialists such as Bert Cochran and the American Socialist, that we could, in the early 1960's, use the reputation of Norman Thomas and the historic role of the Socialist Party to give the New Left a political home. 

  We failed. I cite that as one of many failures that litter the radical landscape.

  In any case, the concept of a single leading party is only possible under special circumstances when events drive us together. Not only in Russia (I'd recommend "The Origin of Russian Communism" by Nicolas Berdyaev, which I read after being urged to do so by I. F. Stone, as the
  essential work in understanding Lenin . . . and while at it, lest I be thought to harbor a special
  hostility to Lenin, I'd urge the remarkable book, "Impressions of Lenin" by Angelica Balabanoff, which gives us a very human revolutionary), but in any country in crisis. In India the Congress
  Party played that role - the Indians could not afford the luxury of a multi-tendency movement. Nor could Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh. Nor, China, under Mao. Nor, in fact, could our own founding fathers, who found it very hard to let go of their role as the Federalist Party).

  If I were to make a special plea to the comrades, it would be that whatever our views of Lenin
  (or Trotsky), we recognize that for many of us there is a healthy and democratic Marxist tradition, that not all Marxists are Marxist/Leninists, and many of us might think of ourselves as owing a special debt to Rosa Luxemburg.

  But already I have wandered from more important points. For many of you who are involved in Occupy, who are active in the campus scene, few of the names I've mentioned matter, if they are
  even known. There is a new world out there, and I am not sure the discussion tomorrow night
  will reflect this. I am very sure that I do not understand this new world of twitter, facebook, and cellphones.

  There are a few points I would submit as part of the discussion.

  One is that I think it is a mistake to abandon independent electoral action. I certainly welcomed Obama's election even if I didn't vote for him, but Obama is part of the problem, not part of the answer. My views here are not popular within my own party, which sometimes gave the impression in 2008 that anyone who voted to Obama had committed a mortal sin. And here let me 
  remember the title of one of Lenin's pamphlets which is still appropriate today - "Left leftism: An infantile Disorder". All politics is local. There are times when there are no candidates we can support and we should direct our energy elsewhere. There are times when it make sense to run an independent or a socialist candidate. And there are times when it makes sense to support the Democratic Party's candidate (as I have, for City Council in this district in Lower Manhattan).
  Bernie Sanders is an excellent example of a socialist winning a seat in Congress outside of the Democratic Party - less because Vermont is filled with socialists than because Bernie has fought for the interests of the folks in his state.

  I think, in this context, that it has been a mistake for the folks who have been having these dialogues, which result in this forum tomorrow night, not to have involved the Green Party.

  The reality of the past fifty years is that the great social movements of our time did not spring from our political groups but from independent movements. The women's movement was not led by
  socialists or communists, but by the women themselves. And while all of our groups joined in and supported the Civil Rights movement, we were not the spark that set the fire. That was Rosa Parks and, more important, it was the Black Church in the South. A church which was (in my
  view) wrong on issues such as women's rights, or gay liberation, but which was dead right on the need for a powerful movement independent of the major parties, acting in the streets. Again, all of us took part in the Vietnam Peace movement, but at least as much credit must go to the pacifists, particularly the War Resisters League, as to any of our socialist groups. And as a movement we had to take on the Democratic Party led by JFK and LBJ, not hesitate (as, sadly, one of my great heroes, Bayard Rustin, did) because it would be a mistake to attack the Democratic Party.

  I do not mean to dismiss the work of a broad range of socialists, both inside our groups and outside of them, but our groups did not lead those movements. In some cases, such as the rights of  homosexuals, socialists were very timid, and came late to the game.

  We did not lead on the issue of the environment - a crucial issue for our time. Here credit must go to the Greens, who sadly, as noted already, were not part of the discussions that have taken place.

  There is another area which should at least be recognized even if none of us known how to deal with it - that is the role of the religious community. I would happily agree with almost any critique of the Catholic Church but . . . the current pressure on Obama to give ground on the matter of the inmates at Guantanamo stem directly from Witness Against Torture, which was set up by friends of mine in the Catholic Worker. In clearing up books damaged by a fire in my apatment, sorting those that might be saved, I came across a paperback titled: Tao Teh King by Lao Tzu".  Looking inside I found the inscription by Norma Becker "To David, Lest our Marxism cause us to lose perspective . . . "

  There is, of course, no way some of these questions could possibly be dealt with in one evening, but neither should they be ignored. The Civil Rights movement was symbolized by an African American preacher - Martin Luther King Jr.  The first great coalition against the Vietnam War was possible only because all political tendencies, from Trotskyist to Communist, from Jewish to Catholic, could trust "the old man, A. J. Muste". 

  I've spent my life in the impossible task of trying to bring a Marxist perspective to view along with a nonviolent perspective. Long ago, when I was a student in Los Angeles, one of my critics in the pacifist movement said "Yes, there is David, he goes to socialist meetings with a copy of Gandhi under his arm, and he comes to our meetings with a copy of Karl Marx". Yes, true. And no apologies. I hope the audience tomorrow night will have in it others embarked on such an impossible task. Revolution - and compassion. 

  At a practical level, I think the best we can hope for is some kind of "united front" which would
  include some of the groups I've listed, and aim less at a single new party, than a recognition that some of the truly effective tasks of the past - such as Mobilization for Survival - aimed at inclusion, not at precision.

  Fraternally,
  David McReynolds