By Lynn Henderson, April 1, 2012
Sheppard now concludes that the Barnes regime from 1980
on carried out actions that brought about the rapid degeneration of the party “transforming
it into the opposite” of what it had been. He confesses his culpability
in this process writing: “I was a willing participant and supporter of every
destructive organizational measure taken against the minority currents in the
SWP from 1980 through the mass expulsions of 1983. These included the
many trials against individuals that extended beyond the minority members.”
Many devoted and talented political activists went
through the trauma of the SWP’s degeneration. Some were expelled, some
became demoralized and resigned, others just drifted away. For many, what
happened and how it happened remains a political mystery. Others were
completely disoriented by the experience. Today, internet blogs contain
more than a few bitter and confused ex SWPers, some looking for vengeance,
others intent on justifying their own actions or inactions. A few have
abandoned Marxism; others even reject materialist philosophy, adopting various
forms of religious and mystical thinking. Another sector falsely
wishes to trace the roots of the Barnes regime degeneration back to James P.
Cannon and even Lenin and Trotsky. What is required more than ever today
is a political analysis of what occurred with the SWP. In the second part
of this book Sheppard presents his explanation for the degeneration of the SWP.
Sheppard gives us an insider’s look, often in horrific
detail, at the organizational degeneration carried out under Barnes’
direction. In this he is uniquely qualified, functioning for most of the
period as Barnes chief organizational enforcer. Expressing what I believe
is sincere regret, he details the pressure that led him personally, step by
step, into playing this role. Where Sheppard’s account come up short is
explaining the political degeneration of Barnes and subsequently the SWP.
Sheppard’s explanation for the root cause of the SWP
degeneration essentially stands on two legs. One, the development of a
personality cult around Jack Barnes, and two the mistaken belief by Barnes that
we were on the verge of a widespread political radicalization of the working
class. As an explanation of the SWP’s political degeneration this two
legged stool is not believable.
The following is a review of the two-volume set political memoir of Barry Sheppard. Sheppard was a central leader of the SWP until his resignation in 1988. Lynn Henderson was a long time member of SWP's leadership body, the National Committee. I will post other reviews of Barry Sheppard's book as they appear.
-KN
The Political and Organizational
Degeneration of the SWP:
A Critique of Barry Sheppard’s
Political Memoir
By Lynn Henderson
The second volume of The Party: The Socialist Workers
Party 1960-1988; A Political Memoir by Barry Sheppard has just been
published. The first volume covered the period of the sixties
radicalization 1960-1973. This volume deals with what Sheppard entitles
Interregnum, Decline and Collapse, 1973-1988. It is an important book.
Sheppard was a member of the party from 1959 until his resignation\expulsion in
1988. Barry Sheppard was a prominent member of the central leadership
around the party’s longtime National Secretary Jack Barnes. He is
exceptional in surviving that experience yet defending today the founding
program of the Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International – that is
defending Marxism-Leninism.
On Cultism
Then, as Sheppard describes it, over a short period of
time everything changed. Barnes inexplicably began functioning as a “star”,
as a “one man band” and morphed into a cult leader. In Sheppard’s
description: “The nature of the cult around Jack Barnes was twofold. He
became the sole initiator of policy, and the supreme arbiter in any discussion.
The obvious result was a growing fear among other leaders of freely expressing
their views, else they be deemed ‘wrong’. An aspect of this development
was the increasing use of trials of members.” And finally in his
concluding chapter Sheppard writes: “The fundamental cause of the degeneration
was the rise of the Barnes cult in the mid-1970’s, which predates the political
degeneration.” This analysis and sequence is exactly wrong.
The rise of the so-called “Barnes cult” was not the
result of some new personality shift but a fundamental change in his political
views. Somewhere around 1978, maybe not all at once but over a relatively
short period of time, Barnes came to a series of sweeping new political conclusions
and positions. I have heard all kinds of stories about Barnes’s so-called
“epiphany” during his 1978 sojourn to Californiaand it is useless speculating
on exactly what happened there. But I think that Gus Horowitz’s
observations as reported by Sheppard in chapter fourteen are perceptive. “When
Jack did return, Gus told me, he was ‘like a man on a mission.’ During his
sojourn to and from California he had some kind of epiphany, like Saul on the
road toDamascus, and had seen the light illuminating the road forward for the
SWP.”
Among Barnes’ new political conclusions and positions (“the
light illuminating the road forward”) were the following: Barnes rejected
Trotsky’s characterization of the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy as “counter
revolutionary through and through”. He concluded that Trotsky’s warning
of capitalist restoration through the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet
Unionwas outdated and wrong. Barnes became convinced that new events, the Cuban
revolution and its emerging extension (Nicaragua and Grenada — “The Three
Giants Rising Out of the Sea”) could and would push the Soviet bureaucracy in a
progressive and even revolutionary direction — that the Stalinist bureaucracy
was reformable after all. Barnes began to believe that the Soviet
bureaucracy was no longer in a position to betray revolutions. Wasn’t it
supporting Cuba? (Remember here, we are talking about the decrepit Brezhnev
regime which as Trotsky foresaw was already moving at somewhere near the speed
of light to becoming “the transmission belt for the reintroduction of
capitalism” into the Soviet Union, a development that Barnes was blind to and
which took him completely by surprise.) Barnes, of course, also had to reject
the call for political revolution in the Soviet Unionas embodied in the Transitional
Program. In this he was comfortable in adopting false positions that
the Castro leadership already held.
He also abandoned the concept of workers and farmer’s
government as first developed by the Bolsheviks and laid out in the Transitional
Program. He concluded that Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution
was fatally flawed and could be no part of the SWP’s program. He revived
the concept of “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasant” which
historically Lenin had discarded. Barnes concluded that Lenin and Trotsky
indeed had serious differences on all these question and Lenin’s conceptions
had been superior to Trotsky’s. All of these were a reversal of the party’s
positions held since its founding.
Barnes also concluded that the SWP’s positions on the
Cuban revolution were wrong. He concluded that the Castro team had always been
revolutionary Marxist and the Cuban revolution experience was not an exception
but the new model to be followed. This was a rejection of the SWP’s
historic position as documented in Hansen’s Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution.
Finally, all of this led Barnes to conclude that the SWP had to distance itself
from any future identification with Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Fourth
International. At some point Mary-Alice Waters joined Barnes in these
political views and the two constituted what was in fact a secret faction.
Having reached such sweeping political conclusions,
which in reality represented a substantial rejection of the historic program of
the SWP and the Fourth International, Barnes had to decide what to do – how to
proceed. He concluded, not illogically, that he had little chance of
reshaping the party in this completely new political direction by openly
presenting his views and engaging in a democratic political discussion of them.
He consciously chose a different course – again maybe not all at once, but over
a relatively short period of time. This political transformation of the
SWP he believed, would not succeed unless “he became the sole initiator of
policy, and the supreme arbiter in any discussion”, at least for an extended
period of time. And the imposition of his new role and status required
creating an atmosphere of political fear and intimidation in the party. Barnes
deliberately avoided expressing or debating his new views openly in the party
but instead opted for changing the party through organizational intimidation
and expulsions.
Convinced that the Soviet bureaucracy rather than being
completely reactionary, could be moved in a revolutionary direction by the
struggles breaking out especially in the underdeveloped world, he began to
search for a way to introduce that fundamentally false position into the Party.
Barnes saw the December 1979 Soviet invasion ofAfghanistanas both confirmation
of his new views and an opportunity for doing such.
I remember that January 1980 National Committee plenum
and how the Barnes coterie was primed to characterize the invasion as a
progressive world changing event. How more than once it was proclaimed
that, “for the first time since Lenin the Red Army was being deployed in a
revolutionary way”. I don’t think Barnes himself used this phrase but he
didn’t take his distance from it either. In addition the Cubans had
supported the Soviet intervention into Czechoslovakia and he wanted to
move the party towards a more completely uncritical stance toward the Castro
leadership. Then the Cubans, to their everlasting and courageous credit,
took their distance from the Afghan invasion. They had neither been
warned nor consulted about the invasion and Fidel was extremely angry and felt
Cuba had been sandbagged by the Soviet leadership as in the “Cuban missile
crisis”. Cuba, while not publicly criticizing the invasion, avoided any
support or justification of it while privately expressing strong criticisms –
criticisms that became widely known. Barnes, who viewed the Cubans as the
leaders of the new emerging “New International” that made the Fourth
International irrelevant, did not want to get caught on the wrong side of that
question so he abruptly reversed himself — and thus the party.
In this, one of his first overtly “cult” like actions,
Barnes alone without any prior consultation was solely responsible for both
formulating the January position to support the invasion and its sudden
reversal in August. Sheppard decries Barnes’ “sandbagging” of the entire
NC and Caroline Lund who was assigned to defend the first position. Barnes had
no choice. He couldn’t reveal and explain his real motivation for supporting
then abruptly not supporting the invasion. Not without starting to reveal
the entirely new direction he surreptitiously intended to take the party on a
whole series of fundamental political positions. If he was to succeed,
Barnes knew he needed the ability and “freedom” to move and maneuver in
whatever direction he felt was needed without the necessity of accounting or
explaining to anyone.
In one sense the “sandbagging” was positive for Barnes.
It stepped up the atmosphere of political intimidation he needed. Some
already absorbed the message that you couldn’t question Barnes without dire
consequences, but not yet all. Peter Camejo apparently had not got the
message when he requested a special Political Committee meeting in which he “strongly
rejected” not the decisions but how the decisions had been made – that was his
political death warrant. Sheppard on the other hand had already gotten
the message from Barnes’ threat to expel him back in 1978 when in a private
meeting he questioned Barnes’ new style of functioning. Sheppard
describes how out of fear of being expelled he kept quiet despite agreeing with
Peter. This demonstrates how effective Barnes’ policy of intimidation was
already becoming.
Were there “cult” aspects to Barnes’ new methods of
functioning? Obviously yes but they were politically motivated and
driven. They were not the result of a suddenly acquired megalomania.
Barnes probably imagined himself as the young Lenin having to move the party
away from the Plekhanov generation even if it required some tough measures.
In the long run, he no doubt told himself, it would all be justified.
But there was another aspect of “cultism” that applied
to the party as a whole. The party had been given a new lease on life by
the 1960’s youth radicalization. A whole new layer of young,
committed revolutionary cadre had revitalized the party. But the party
could not completely escape the effects of its long isolation from the working
class and a working class radicalization. Its long existence as a tiny
cadre organization was taking its toll. It acquired a certain insolated,
ingrown character. Especially after the massVietnam anti-war movement had
run its course, the party began taking on some aspects of counter culturalism.
Through no fault of their own, comrades’ political and social lives
tended to exist almost exclusively within the confines of party membership.
To some extent the party functioned as a sheltering home, shielding members
from the alienating and demoralizing nature of American capitalist society.
Barnes recognized this and saw the advantages of a
membership whose entire political, social and even economic life centered
around and was dependent on party membership. Barnes knew that expulsions
and especially fear of expulsion were going to be a useful and necessary tool
in his planned political transformation of the party. Removal from party
membership would be an almost unthinkably traumatic act. You would be
shunned, isolated, and cast out into the cold of a hostile U.S.capitalist
society.
I remember the atmosphere and my experiences when I went
on tour before the 1981 convention to present our minority tendency’s position.
I believe it was in Atlanta that I had lunch with a comrade with whom I had a
personal friendship. She told me while literally trembling, “Please let’s
not talk any politics.” She understood quite clearly that any sympathy
for the minority position meant expulsion and she did not want the temptation
of even being exposed to the minority’s arguments. In the Minneapolis
branch during the pre-convention discussion a majority comrade made a
particularly vicious and false factional remark. A long time leading
branch member Helen Scheer, despite consistently voting with the majority, could
not contain herself and jumped up and said; “That’s self-serving nonsense.”
Minority supporter Cynthia Burke later asked Helen in private how she
could go along with the majority line. She had a short one sentence
answer, “I don’t want to be expelled.”
In Chapter 26 – “The Turn Derails” Sheppard has a lot of
important information and excellent descriptions of Barnes disastrous trade
union policies. But I don’t think his analysis of why Barnes adopted the
abstentionist “talking socialism” strategy in the party’s “turn” to industry is
correct. Sheppard almost exclusively attributes this self isolating
policy to the fundamental mistake of projecting a just-around-the-corner
political radicalization of the working class. Under his scenario Barnes,
in response to the escalating attacks on the working class, recognized that the
unions were in retreat, but believed the working class was still under going a
political radicalization. So, Barnes believed we had to pull back from
union activities and politics and make our central focus in the unions
socialist propaganda.
This wasn’t the primary motivation for Barnes’ policy.
The “talking socialism” strategy wasn’t a “pull back” strategy but was imposed
pretty much from the get go. Barnes recognized that comrades functioning
and becoming active in the unions were a potential threat to how he intended to
transform the party. Being involved in the day to day problems, struggles
and politics of the union was something that required comrades to think through
their concrete situations and develop creative ways to apply our revolutionary
program. It required comrades to think on their feet and develop
collaborative, non-sectarian relations with layers of healthy non-SWP union
members.
The party’s experience in theVietnam anti-war movement
was a rich and exemplary one in which we were able to have an historical impact
way out of proportion to our size. But the strategy and tactics of our
work in the anti-war movement could almost entirely be directed out from the
center. The problems, opponents and arguments comrades faced were pretty
much the same whether they were in Chicago, Boston or LA. The national
office could work out our line and it could be discussed and effectively
disseminated through our national anti-war fraction. Work in the trade
unions is quite different.
Barnes instinctively sensed that allowing the “turn”
comrades to function in the trade unions would produce members with confidence
to think and act independently and develop a political base that wasn’t
completely tied to the center. In chapter 26 Sheppard has a revealing
account of comrade Linda Loew’s experience in the steelworkers union while in
the Dallas branch. He describes the exemplary work she was able to do in
the union and a strike despite just being off probation. As a consequence
of her union activities she acquired some authority with her fellow union
members and was able to make several contacts for the party and sell not a few
single copies and Militant subscriptions. A result not matched by many “talking
socialist” comrades. Despite this Barnes, through the branch
leadership, was able to put the kibosh on her union activities.
Sheppard quotes Linda on her conclusions from the experience: “In retrospect, it
seems that the Party elsewhere was becoming preoccupied with internal
organization questions …. But turning our face outward seemed always to
have energizing and healthy ramifications, a sound posture in any period…. I
sensed a shift that would not be good for the life and health of the Party.”
Jack Barnes sure as hell knew he did not want a lot of Linda Loews in the
party.
There were some things happening in the unions.
But Barnes made damn sure comrades were kept as far away from them as possible
and remained on the self-isolating and safe track of “talking socialism”.
There was the large T.D.U. movement which the majority completely ignored.
It was no accident that the Teamsters did not become one of our targeted
unions. There was the Labor Notes development from which we completely
abstained. I was a witness to the Hormel P-9 strike inMinnesota.
This was a pivotal strike that captured nationwide attention. Despite the
influence of Ray Rogers and his defeatist Corporate Campaign strategy, the outcome
of the strike was not foreordained. The union membership was prepared to
fight and had widespread support throughout the upper Midwest. Despite a large
Twin Cities branch, the SWP largely abstained from direct involvement in strike
support, limiting itself to socialist propaganda.
This was all part of a broader policy pushed by Barnes.
His hostility and ridicule toward the comrades developing “roots” in the
workplace and unions was not limited to the workplace and unions. It didn’t
flow from the “plug in” theory Sheppard describes in chapter 26. Barnes
made a point of transferring comrades from branch to branch, from city to city,
from fraction to fraction and from industry to industry. The only long
term political relationship he wanted comrades to have was with the national
office. He recognized that the branches most resistant to his plans for
politically transforming the party were precisely those branches that had some
continuity and roots, especially if they had some history and roots in trade
union work – Minneapolis, San Francisco, LA, Boston. I remember a
conversation with Barnes, before he wrote me off as a hopeless cause, in which
he ridiculed the idea of “roots” by supposedly invoking the authority of
Cannon. He said Cannon had told him that for comrades who had homes it would be
a good thing if they burned down every few years. Is it any wonder that
some healthy workers and union members began to see “talking socialism” SWPers
as some kind of Jehovah Witness type weirdoes?
The second leg of Sheppard’s explanation, Barnes
mistaken position that we were at the beginning of a widespread political
radicalization, also fails as a central cause for what happened with
Barnes and the SWP. We all, majority and minorities to one degree or another,
held this mistaken assessment. Does that conveniently mean that we
were all somehow responsible for what happened with the SWP? No. Of
course in the broadest sense, the rock bottom cause of what happen to the party
was a function of our long isolation from the working class. However this
does not mean the SWP degeneration was inevitable. Under the pressure of this
long postponement of a working class upsurge, Barnes lost confidence in
the party’s political program and, in a search for short cuts, he
adopted a whole series of new political positions which in effect constituted
an adaptation to Stalinism. He then moved surreptitiously to impose this
new program on the party.
When I say Barnes made an adaptation to Stalinism I want
to be clear in what I’m saying. Was Barnes or even less those who came to
agreed with him Stalinists? Absolutely not. The political essence
of Stalinism is the willingness to sacrifice revolution to the continued
privileges and material interest of a bureaucratic caste. Barnes
sincerely wished to make revolutions inCuba, inNicaragua,Grenada, theUnited
Statesand elsewhere. He succumbed to pressures he could not understand or
deal with.
Another area in which Barnes now adapted to Stalinist
politics was around an entirely false interpretation of the concept “workers
and farmers government” and how it applied to the unfolding Nicaraguan
revolution. Barnes’ new concept of workers and farmers government was a central
aspect of his break with Trotsky/Lenin, and the historical program of the SWP
and Fourth International.
Where did the concept “workers and farmers government”
originally come from? It first appeared in the agitation of the
Bolsheviks in 1917 and further developed by the Bolsheviks to deal with a very
fortuitous situation following the successful 1917 revolution. Under the
radicalizing impact of WWI and the successful Russian revolution, revolutionary
uprisings of workers and farmers in a number of countries, including in
colonial and semi colonial areas, took place. Some of these were even
able to seize governmental power. Not only were these uprisings not led
by Leninist parties, they were also devoid of any clear socialist program.
You had a situation where revolutionary forces had
smashed the existing capitalist government, seized governmental powers
themselves and were presiding over an essentially capitalist state. What
posture, what orientation was the new Soviet workers state to take to this
development? They of course embraced and supported these new worker and
farmer governments. They also did everything they could to influence
these revolutionaries of action to deepen the revolution, adopt a clear
socialist program and move ahead to smash the remaining capitalist state.
They understood that such workers and farmers
governments were an intrinsically unstable phenomenon. They recognized
that time was not on the side of these worker and farmers governments.
Either they moved ahead relatively quickly or the forces of reaction could
consolidate and throw the revolution back. The longer the workers and
peasants are held back from nationalizing the land and decisively smashing the
capitalist state, the worse the relative position of the workers and peasants
vis a vis the capitalists. A molecular process of reconstituting
capitalist governmental power inevitably takes place beneath the surface by
virtue of the still intact capitalist economic power.
This was the position of the Bolsheviks in power, this
was the position presented in the Transitional Program, the basic
programmatic document adopted at the founding conference of the Fourth
International and this was the position defended by the Henderson/Weinstein
minority tendency. This was the position that Barnes threw out.
Instead, Barnes adopted many aspects of the subsequent Stalinist reformulation
of workers and farmers government. A reformulation which converted it
into a bridge to the Stalinist concept of “two stage” revolution and popular
frontism. Furthermore, Barnes did this without ever openly presenting his
real views and blocked any real discussion in the party over this sweeping
programmatic reversal.
Specifically with respect toNicaragua, the FSLN had yet
to settle accounts with the capitalists inNicaragua. They had yet to
advance a program that would lead to the establishment of the dictatorship of
the proletariat. They rejected nationalization of the land and despite
the real measures in favor of workers and peasants imposed on the Nicaraguan
capitalists, the FSLN stopped short of infringing on the principle of
capitalist profits. This was justified in their view – the dominant FSLN view –
because the national economy could only be reconstructed with the aid of the
anti-Somoza bourgeoisie, and thus upon the foundation of a fundamentally capitalist
economy. Speeches by FSLN leaders described a policy of following a
middle course between private ownership and nationalization for an indefinite
period ahead – a mixed economy for a prolonged period.
This of course was in no way comparable with Lenin’s New
Economic Policy adopted by the Bolsheviks in 1921. In that case a
conscious Marxist party with a clear communist program had decisively
established the dictatorship of the proletariat – the capitalist state had been
smashed and a workers’ state was clearly in place. The “mixed economy,” “pluralistic
society” policy followed by the FSLN represented their conviction that it was
tactically necessary to postpone the dictatorship of the proletariat in order
not to alienate anti-Somoza elements of the national bourgeois and cut off the
possibility of investments and aid from sectors of world capitalism. This
policy presented a dire threat to the Nicaraguan revolution.
The Barnes/Waters new concept of workers and farmers
government was presented as if to imply that it was identical to the
dictatorship of the proletariat; as if it were merely a popular designation of
the already established dictatorship of the proletariat. Barnes/Waters asserted
that the FSLN was “irreversibly on the road toward consolidating the
dictatorship of the proletariat.” The Barnes/Waters majority supported
and even embraced the idea of a prolonged mixed economy not as a danger to the
Nicaraguan revolution but a positive characteristic. Where the workers
and farmers government is conceived as a prolonged stage and thus is
counter-posed to the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is transformed, as
Trotsky put it in the Transitional Program, “from a bridge to socialist
revolution into the chief barrier upon its path.”
Barnes/Waters projected the FSLN and even the “New Jewel”
movement in Grenada as the new incarnation of the Castro-led July 26th
movement in the Cuban revolution. Tragically for the Nicaraguan
revolution, nothing could have been further from truth. And this
truth was not difficult to discover. From their own political statements and
speeches it was clear the leaders of the FSLN were following an entirely
different political perspective and strategy than Castro’s July 26th movement.
Speech by FSLN Commander Tomas Borge October 10, 1980
“We could have taken away all their (the Nicaraguan
capitalists’) businesses and we would not have been overthrown; I’m sure of
that. But what is more conducive to the economic development of the
country is what is best for the Nicaraguan people. So when we talk about
a mixed economy, we mean it; and when we talk about political pluralism, we
mean it. This is not a short-term maneuver but our strategic approach….
We are not going to violate these principles. But
we are not going to let them decapitalize their businesses, because that means
taking resources out of the country and destroying those enterprises. We
want to see the development of private enterprise, private commerce, and
private cultivation of the land. Furthermore, we have no interest in
nationalizing the land. On the contrary, we are interested in expanding
private ownership of the land. We think this should be basically in the
form of cooperatives, but if there are also private enterprises involved in
production, we want them to develop too.”
Daniel Ortega Interview Le Monde March 27, 1981
“We hope to carry out a difficult task, i.e., maintain
political pluralism and a mixed economy in a situation where the class struggle
is reaching explosive dimensions. The main obstacle to our task, the
reason for this polarization, is the lack of flexibility of the political
representatives of the private sector. Everything is still possible, but
it is important that this group, which does not represent the totality of all
private industrialists, understand the revolution as a reality in which we can
coexist. At this time, their attitude only stimulates the class struggle.”
FSLN Commander Jaime Wheelock El Gran Desafio
1983
“It is important to understand that the socialist model
is a solution for contradictions that only exist in developed capitalist
countries …..Even though we have socialist principles, we cannot effect the
transformation of our society by socializing the means of production.
This would not lead to socialism, rather, on the contrary, it could lead to the
destruction and disarticulation of our society.”
Daniel Ortega interview with former California Gov.
Jerry Brown New Perspectives October 1984
“The greatest favor we could perform for this (Reagan)
administration would be if we were to define ourselves as a regime such as Cuba’s…We’re
struggling to establish a regime that is of a democratic and pluralistic
nature. We’re not imitating any country in particular, but we have sought
the contribution of the experiences of other countries. Perhaps the
Nicaraguan Revolution is something that can be compared to the Algerian
Revolution. In the context of Latin America, we would see it as being
close to what the Mexican process has been.”
FSLN Minister of Defense Humberto Ortega Le Volcan
Nicaraguayen 1984
“We cannot resolve at the same time the problems of
national liberation and those of social liberation. We must first
complete the stage of national independence and national liberation.”
Tomas Borge Interview with the Nicaraguan magazine Pensamiento
Propio July 1985
“The geo-political context (in which our revolution
developed) compelled us, independently of our own will, to develop political
pluralism and a mixed economy. This tactic became transformed into a
strategy, and today the mixed economy is neither an operational choice nor a
camouflage. It is a strategy….
But this has rendered the role of revolutionary
leadership among the masses more difficult. Political pluralism, the
mixed economy, and the general traits of our revolution tend to sow confusion
among the masses. There is not – nor could there be – an ideological
project as clearly defined as the one that existed inCuba. Our project is
muddled and complicated, and muddled projects sow confusion among the masses.”
Interview with Tomas Borge New Left Review
July/August 1987
“The bourgeoisie has not resigned itself to losing
political power and is fighting with all its weapons – including economic
weapons which threaten the very existence of the economy. It is no
accident that the bourgeoisie has been given so many economic incentives, more
even than the workers; we ourselves have been more attentive in giving the
bourgeoisie economic opportunities than in responding to the demands of the
working class. We have sacrificed the working class in favor of the
economy as part of a strategic plan; but the bourgeoisie continues to resist,
sometimes boycotting the economy for the sake of its political interests.”
Prominent leaders of the FSLN pledged time and again
their commitment to mixed economy and not as a “short term maneuver” but
as their “strategic approach”. As early as 1981 in the La Monde
interview Daniel Ortega assures the “political representatives of the private
sector” that the revolution is one “in which we can coexist”. He then
laments the fact that their inflexible “attitude only stimulates the class
struggle”. Whether he’s conscious of it or not, he’s requesting
their cooperation in tapping down the “explosive” class struggle. Can you
imagine Fidel at any stage in the evolution of the July 26th
Movement making such a statement?
Perhaps most ironic is Daniel Ortega’s October 1984
quote in which he holds up the Algerian Revolution as the model for the
Nicaraguan Revolution – the classic example in which a workers and farmers
government was crushed precisely because it did not aggressively push ahead to
a socialist conclusion.
In 1984, FSLN Minister of Defense Humberto Ortega in Le
Volcan Nicaraguayen explained: “We cannot resolve at the same time the
problems of national liberation and those of social liberation. We must
first complete the stage of national independence and national liberation.”
Here we see workers and farmers government falsely used
to justify the Stalinist concept of two stage revolution. In his speech to the
First Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, December 1975, Fidel describes
quite differently the relationship between national liberation and social
liberation:
“Yet, in the conditions of a country likeCuba, could the
revolution limit itself simply to national liberation while maintaining a
regime of capitalist exploitation? Or was it not necessary to move
forward toward full social liberation as well?
Imperialism could not even tolerate a revolution of
national liberation inCuba. From the time of the first Agrarian Reform
Law, theUnited Statesbegan to organize a military operation againstCuba.
They were even less disposed to tolerate socialism in our country. The
simple idea that a victorious revolution inCuba could provide an example for
allLatin America, frightened the Yankee ruling circles. But the Cuban
nation had no other alternative. The people could not be stopped.
Our national and our social liberation were inextricably
bound up. Moving forward became a historic necessity. Standing
still would have been an act of treason and cowardice that would have
transformed us once again into a Yankee colony and wage slaves.”
Escalating Organizational Intimidation
Sheppard accurately describes the escalated campaign of
charges, trials and expulsions orchestrated by Barnes through 1981-1983.
One third of the party’s membership was eventually driven out. Then faced
with the 1983 party convention and the prospects of pre-convention discussion,
the secret faction violated the party’s constitution which required that “National
Conventions of the Party shall be held at least every two years”, by canceling
the constitutionally mandated convention and in its place substituting an “educational”
conference devoted to the Barnes/Waters political line. This was accomplished
without a whimper of protest from the remaining majority membership.
Only after this long campaign of intimidation, after
which every remaining member could not help but know that any opposition to the
Barnes/Waters line meant expulsion, did they feel safe in finally presenting
their new political positions in writing. Without a prior party vote or
even party discussion, Barnes/Waters now quickly moved to publish in the
New International two articles completely reversing the core political
program of the SWP since its founding — Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist
Continuity Today, in the Fall 1983 issue; under Jack Barnes name, The Workers
and Farmers’ Government: A Popular Revolutionary Dictatorship, in the
Spring 1984 issue; under Mary-Alice Waters’ name.
Sheppard says very little about these two sweeping
programmatic articles. He barely mentions the Waters article. The
Workers and Farmers’ Government: A Popular Revolutionary Dictatorship is
devoted to explaining and justifying the Barnes/Waters reformulated version of
workers and farmers government. In the opening sentences Waters proclaims
that the historical task facing the working-class movement “is to establish a
new kind of state power – a popular revolutionary dictatorship…” As far as I
know, Waters introduces here an entirely new term (popular revolutionary
dictatorship) — and to describe what? It is ambiguous whether it applies
to a government or the class nature of the state. And the ambiguity is
deliberate. “Popular revolutionary dictatorship” has certainly never
before been used by Marxist/Leninists to describe the class nature of a state
and state power. For revolutionary socialists the terms workers state,
socialist state and state power based on the dictatorship of the proletariat
have clear and established meanings. What then is a “popular
revolutionary dictatorship” and what lies behind the crafting of this new term?
Throughout the article Waters uses the term to confuse,
obscure and blur the distinctions between the class character of state and
government power – between the concept of a workers’ and farmers’ government
and the concept of a workers’ state. Early on Waters asserts: “The
October revolution established a popular revolutionary dictatorship of the
workers and peasants.” What the October revolution established of course
was the dictatorship of the proletariat and a workers state. So here
Waters draws an equal sign between “popular revolutionary dictatorship of the
workers and peasants” and a workers’ state — an equal sign between “popular
revolutionary dictatorship of the workers and peasants” and the dictatorship of
the proletariat.
Toward the end of the article Waters tells us that in
Nicaragua“a popular revolutionary dictatorship – a workers’ and peasants’
government – emerged from the victory over the Somozaist tyranny in July 1979.”
While never explicitly making the claim, it suggests that the FSLN government
is equivalent to the dictatorship of the proletariat and even that Nicaragua is
a workers state. Attempting to cast the net of confusion even wider, Waters
writes in another section of the article: “The workers’ and farmers’
governments in our own epoch are popular dictatorships of the revolutionary
classes that have taken power.”
Barnes/Waters new concept of workers’ and farmers’
government was presented as if to imply that it was identical to the
dictatorship of the proletariat; as if it were merely a popular designation of
the already established dictatorship of the proletariat. All the
machinations around this newly invented term “popular revolutionary
dictatorship” in the Waters’ article amount to little more than ham-fisted
prestidigitation in attempting to forward this idea.
Time and again, Barnes/Waters and their surrogates
asserted that the FSLN was “irreversibly on the road toward consolidating the
dictatorship of the proletariat.” Then plunging ahead even further, Barnes/Waters
supported and even embraced the idea of a prolonged stage of “mixed economy”.
They took the position that the FSLN workers’ and farmers’ government,
presiding over an essentially capitalist state with a mixed economy for an
extended period of time, presented no problems for the future of the
revolution. For them the pace of the transition away from a capitalist
economy to a workers state was not a decisive or particularly relevant issue.
Waters gives voice to this idea in discussing the
Russian Revolution: “The decisive question was not the pace of the transition,
but whose interests the new state power defended.” While commenting that
in Cuba the process of transition “moved exceptionally fast to the
expropriations of imperialist – and Cuban-owned capitalist property in the
summer and fall of 1960”, Waters sees no necessary connection between that pace
and the Cuban workers’ and farmers’ government’s success in establishing the
first and only workers state in the western hemisphere. To the contrary, Waters
goes out of her way to stress the advantages of a slow pace in the transition.
Waters begins by “educating” us that the Bolsheviks
recognized “that the transition from capitalism to socialism would take an
entire historical epoch…” Of course they did – Lenin and Trotsky, and
especially Trotsky in countering Stalin’s claim that a socialist society had
been established in theSoviet Union, hammered this truth home to us time and
time again. But what were they referring to? — the transition from a
workers state to a socialist society. This indeed would require an
historical epoch, probably even for an advanced industrial society.
But that’s not the transition we are talking about in
Nicaragua or 1959 Cuba. The transition faced there was not from a workers
state to a fully developed socialist society but from a petty-bourgeois
workers and farmers government to a workers state. And the revolutions in
Nicaragua and Cuba, under intense economic, political, and military attacks by
a powerful U.S.imperialism, had something less than an “historical epoch” in
which to make that transition if they were to survive.
Cuba under the Castro leadership, in response to the
increasingly heavy blows which American imperialism dealt the small republic,
“moved exceptionally fast” to institute a thoroughgoing land reform, toppled
capitalist property relations both foreign and domestic in the commanding
sectors of industry, and began economic planning. As a result, by
August-October 1960, we in the SWP recognized that Cuba had become a
workers’ state. The FSLN leadership in Nicaragua, in response to the
increasing blows of U.S.imperialism, postponed these kinds of steps,
clinging to the doctrine of prolonged mixed economy, and the revolution was
overwhelmed and defeated.
Throughout the article, Waters proclaims the
decisive centrality of the workers and farmers taking government power.
This becomes the Rosetta stone for judging everything. The FSLN
leadership was deserving of absolute and uncritical acclaim because they had “a
nose for power” as Waters puts it. While seizing governmental power from the
bourgeoisie is certainly an admirable and indispensable step, and a positive
respite from the course of Stalinized communist parties throughout the world,
it is not the end step or culmination of establishing a workers’ state, but
only the beginning.
Waters even more sweepingly makes workers’ and farmers’
government the universal road for all socialist revolutions. The SWP was
among the earliest, most consistent, and most perceptive defenders of the
evolving Cuban revolution. But we never projected its course as the
universal model. Barnes/Waters do see it as the model – and not just
forLatin America and underdeveloped countries. Barnes/Waters take their
newly revised, distorted concept of workers and farmers government and make it
the model for all socialist revolutions — past, present, and future. This
includes the 1917 Russian revolution where, Waters tells us: “The October
revolution established a popular revolutionary dictatorship of the workers and
peasants” – and this model, Waters asserts, will apply to all future socialist
revolution to come, even in the most advanced capitalist countries.
Waters concludes the article with a vision of numerous
workers and farmers governments presiding for extended periods over “mixed”
economies. “The advance”, she explains, “toward a world federation of
workers and farmers republics is inseparable from the fight to build an
international movement of the toilers of the world…”
Their Trotsky and Ours
Sheppard also brushes off the significance of the long
Barnes article, Their Trotsky and Ours characterizing it as “somewhat
garbled and self-contradictory”. I have to disagree. Whatever his
limitations as a writer, Their Trotsky and Ours is not exactly garbled.
Barnes is starkly clear in presenting a completely new political line. In
the opening pages Barnes clearly describes the purpose of the article: “We have
to clarify the relationship to our program of what is known in our movement as
Trotsky’s theory or strategy of permanent revolution.” The article then
immediately explains that permanent revolution has no relationship to “our
program” but is in fact counter to it.
“Permanent revolution does not contribute today to
arming either ourselves or other revolutionists to lead the working class and
its allies to take power and use that power to advance the world socialist
revolution…It has been an obstacle in our movement to an objective reading of
the masters of Marxism, in particular the writings of Lenin.”
Barnes hangs his attack on Trotsky and permanent
revolution around the exact same claims made by Stalin in his attacks on
Trotsky and the Left Opposition. That Trotsky underestimated the peasantry and
that Lenin’s pre-1917 algebraic formulation democratic dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry constitutes deep and fundamental programmatic
differences between Lenin and Trotsky — programmatic differences which persist
right to the present.
Barnes also explains that these anti-Leninist ideas and
anti-Leninist programmatic positions are not a recent development in the SWP
but rather have infected the SWP and the Fourth International right from its
birth. The 1928 program of the Left Opposition which directly led to the
founding of the SWP and the Fourth International, while containing a
powerful critique of the crystallizing Stalinist bureaucracy and its
abandonment of internationalism, also contained, according to Barnes,
anti-Leninist positions: “The document, however, also had significant leftist
weaknesses, as we’ve seen. Our movement has been educated on those parts
of the document as well.”
Barnes explains that this anti-Leninist content has only
recently been discovered: “to my knowledge (not) anyone in the leadership of
our movement has ever taken issue with those sections before. We have
never pointed to them as contrary to our overall course, which they are.
They are contrary to our programmatic continuity with Lenin, and contrary to
the lessons from actual revolutions, led by proletarian revolutionist, since
World War II.”
Somehow the anti-Leninist content of the 1928 document,
permanent revolution and the Transitional Program escaped the attention
of Cannon, Dobbs, Hansen and everyone else in the SWP and the Fourth
International only to be suddenly discovered and revealed by the Barnes/Waters
secret faction 55 years later. Barnes warns that the party will be unable
to carry out its revolutionary role “unless we disentangle this central core of
our political continuity from the leftist bias brought in by the erroneous side
of Trotsky’s pre-1917 views, including those revived by Trotsky in the 1928
document.”
“We must recognize”, Barnes explains, “that Trotsky’s
theory of permanent revolution is not a correct generalization of the historic
program and strategy of communism.” And, according to Barnes, what now
makes it possible for us to recognize these “anti-Leninist”, “leftist” errors,
is the party’s proletarian turn. “That is what we in the Socialist
Workers Party have discovered over the past five years since we made our turn
to industry, since we began becoming more proletarian, since we began to emerge
from the semi-sectarian existence imposed on us by conditions in the 1950s and
1960s, and since we began following more closely the course of the revolutions
and proletarian leaderships in Central America and the Caribbean.”
This provides a convenient dichotomy for the secret
faction. It is only those who criticize and don’t understand the “talking
socialism” turn to industry who cling to outmoded, outdated concepts of workers’
and farmers’ government and permanent revolution.
The test of theory is practice. It was the SWP,
armed with the original concept of workers’ and farmers’ government and
permanent revolution, which was able to most correctly analyze the Cuban
revolution and the evolution of the Castro leadership – and become among the
earliest and most effective defenders of the Cuban workers state. The
Barnes/Waters faction, rejecting permanent revolution and applying their new
distorted concept of workers’ and farmers’ government, consistently failed to
understand the evolution of events in Nicaragua and the missteps of the FSLN,
Sandinista leadership — on the contrary, it led them to support and
encourage these errors.
At the conclusion of Their Trotsky and Ours, Barnes
stresses and drives home to the party the sweeping programmatic changes he
was now imposing: “In some ways, the shift I am proposing is one of the biggest
changes in our movement since we first emerged, more than half a century
ago, as a distinct political current in world politics. Since that time,
permanent revolution in all its meanings has been a guiding concept of our
entire world movement, including the SWP.”
Conclusion
It is not accurate to explain the degeneration of the
SWP as foremost the product of a “Barnes Cult”. You know, Barnes was not
exactly a charismatic personality. At least I never thought so and I
never met anyone who did. He was no great shakes as an orator and when he
was willing to reveal his political positions he demonstrated little ability to
clearly present them in written form. Barnes’ skills lay elsewhere, in
psychologically evaluating and manipulating people without shrinking from a
certain personal ruthlessness.
Sheppard stresses the organizational side of the SWP’s
degeneration. This is perhaps understandable in that he was both a prominent
facilitator of the Barnes intimidation and expulsion campaign and eventually a
hapless victim of it. Sheppard criticizes himself for not opposing the
Barnes organizational degeneration even though he continued to support the
majority political positions. He says he should have formed a bloc with
the minorities in defense of party democracy while still supporting the
Barnes/Waters political program and call for the removal of Jack Barnes as
National Secretary. There are a lot of illusions expressed here.
One thing that we were always taught in the healthy SWP
was that political questions come first; organizational questions are
secondary. This is true even for a memoir. The only way to have
successfully prevented the Barnes degeneration was to confront him politically.
To mobilize enough support in the membership so Barnes/Waters would be forced
to defend their secret political program in an open democratic debate.
Barnes knew he would have an extremely difficult time doing this which is why
he functioned organizationally the way he did. This is the course Nat
Weinstein and I followed in forming the Henderson/Weinstein political tendency
leading up to the 1981 convention. Sheppard himself eventually also recognized
the false political line of Barnes/Waters but not until after he had been
successfully politically exiled.
The degeneration of the SWP was the result of a secret
faction (Barnes/Waters) whose calculated goal was to overthrow the fundamental
program of the SWP and Fourth International. The programmatic strategy of
this faction centered around two themes. One, revising and distorting the
concept of workers’ and farmers’ governments as originally developed by the
Bolsheviks and subsequently incorporated into the Transitional Program,
and two, reviving Lenin’s discarded pre-1917 formula, Democratic
Dictatorship of Workers and Peasants, to claim fundamental differences
between Lenin and Trotsky which negated the validity of Permanent Revolution.
Along with this they abandoned the concept of political revolution and rejected
the position that Stalinism was “counter revolutionary through and through”.
Finally, in practical political functioning they abandoned the method of the Transitional
Program.
The Barnes/Waters program was and is a direct attack on
Marxism-Leninism. An even more sweeping, more fundamental, and unfortunately
more successful attack than that mounted by the notorious Burnham/Shachtman
faction. The program of the Henderson/Weinstein tendency was nothing more
than a direct political challenge to the Barnes/Waters revisionist program.
The minority platform of the Henderson/Weinstein
tendency was defined by two documents presented in 1981 – The Transitional
Program and Method: the Road Forward and the Trade Union Minority
Report. In this platform we objected to the misuse of the workers and
farmers government label as a completely uncritical carte blank to the FSLN
leadership, its program and its every action. We objected to the use of
the workers and farmers label to proclaim that Nicaragua was “irreversibly” on
the road to a workers’ state. We objected to equating workers and farmers
government with dictatorship of the proletariat. We foresaw and objected
to Barnes’ rejection of permanent revolution, and we directly challenged him on
this, which forced him at the 1981 party convention to blatantly lie to the
party. We criticized the new sectarian “talk socialism” policy which
abandoned the party’s long and successful strategy in trade union work.
We objected to the new sectarian policy abstaining from building the same kind
of broad united front movement against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and
Central America as we had led in the Vietnam anti-war movement. We
objected to the party’s abstention from united front actions and meetings in
defense of Poland’s Solidarity movement. We objected to the misuse of the
“turn” to force the YSA off the campuses and abandon student work. And
finally we objected to the Barnes/Waters faction driving the party away from
the method of the Transitional Program.
As Sheppard correctly points out in his conclusion,
despite the adverse objective situation the SWP faced, with the continued
postponement of a working class upsurge, its degeneration was not inevitable.
But the successful intimidation campaign and mass expulsions succeeded in
allowing for the political destruction of the SWP. While the SWP was not
more than a nucleus of a potential mass revolutionary party, its
elimination is a significant defeat for the American working class and the
Fourth International. Any future upsurge of the working class will now
have to face the much more difficult task of building such a party from
scratch.
Barry Sheppard in this memoir chronicles the tragic degeneration
of the SWP especially from the organizational side. It is a unique and
valuable contribution to understanding what happened in the SWP by someone who
despite going through a horrific personal political journey remains a
revolutionary socialist.
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