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	Workers Vanguard No. 1014	7 December 2012

Tweet Carter

1943—2012

Veteran Spartacist cadre Tweet Carter died on November 20 at the age of 69 from complications of diverticulitis following six weeks of hospitalization. Taking seriously the Communist Manifesto’s declaration that “the Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims,” Tweet was fearless in public work and often sparked controversy by saying exactly what she thought inside the party. Her greatest strength was her appetite and skill for political combat with organizations falsely claiming to uphold revolutionary Marxism. Tweet will be deeply missed by her comrades, particularly comrade Dimir, her husband.

Later in life, Tweet often spoke in New York local meetings about her experiences as a nurse trying to care for impoverished patients. So we note with bitterness that the criminal lack of preparation for Hurricane Sandy by the management at New York University’s hospital in all likelihood contributed to her death. Only three days after being operated on, Tweet had to be carried down 14 flights of stairs and moved to another hospital when backup generators failed, an experience she described as utterly terrifying.

In an appreciation following her death, Dimir described how Tweet, growing up in the Jim Crow South, “was seared to the depths of her being by the horrors of black oppression.” He continued, “A scion of the stone-racist white elite in Florida’s capital, she rejected the legacy of slavery root and branch. While her classmates focused on upcoming cotillions and becoming cheerleaders, Tweet read Voltaire and Spinoza looking for a guide to escaping the barbarity of Southern capitalist society.” In a document written a decade ago, Tweet recalled watching TV in 1963 as white Birmingham, Alabama, cops used fire hoses and police dogs to attack black protesters, including schoolchildren. She told her father, “That settles it, we have got to have integration.” But, she noted, “my father with equal conviction declared, ‘Integration is a Communist plot and Martin Luther King is a Communist.’ Bells went off in my head. I set out looking for the communists and didn’t stop until I found the Spartacist League.”

Tweet was further radicalized in the late 1960s, a period of tumultuous political and social struggles and ferment on the left, especially over the Vietnam War. Though her family’s conceptions of Southern womanhood did not include women getting a college education, Tweet made her way to Florida State University in Tallahassee. She had become involved in the burgeoning New Left and was active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). And this was how she found the Spartacist League.

In a gathering in New York the day after Tweet’s death, one comrade recalled meeting her in 1969. Aware that there was a leftist SDS branch in Tallahassee, our party center had sent two people to meet them. A couple of male SDS members did a lot of the talking at first, but it did not take our comrades long to see that Tweet was the one who was really serious about revolutionary politics. In early September of that year, she joined the SL at its National Conference. She rapidly became known among leftists all over the South and within SDS as a powerful fighter for our views. The SL had belatedly entered this heterogeneous student radical organization, especially after a 1969 split gave rise to a wing led by the eclectic Stalinist group Progressive Labor that crudely espoused an orientation to the working class. Our supporters in SDS formed the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC).

Her correspondence in those days was characteristically full of ideas to build the party. At the time, she was already married to Dimir, an erudite professor of languages some nine years her senior, and she set about recruiting him to Spartacist politics, with some help from her comrades. She noted in one report that it had been a great relief to Dimir when she stopped reading him bits from Mao’s “little Red Book.”

In her early years in the party, she participated in and led many interventions at public meetings held by opponent groups viscerally hostile to our Trotskyist program. Tweet was without peer at unmasking the socialist pretensions of a wide spectrum of political opponents, earning our internally coveted “Mad Dog Trotskyite” award in 1970.

The early 1970s were crucial years for the Spartacist League. In the hotbed of that time, we were often able to engage members of ostensibly revolutionary organizations in political debate that would be unimaginable today. Tweet was shaped by this environment, and she helped shape the party that responded to it. The SL grew not only through individual recruitment but also through important fusions with groupings won from ostensibly Trotskyist as well as Stalinist organizations. This accretion of cadres made possible a transformation of our organization, especially by constructing a stronger national center and producing for the first time a regular press, launching Workers Vanguard in 1971, at first as a monthly paper.

Tweet was also involved in our increased efforts to break out of national isolation in the U.S. In early 1971 she went to Europe to meet with groups claiming to be anti-revisionist Trotskyists. As a speaker at our New York gathering in Tweet’s honor recalled, some previous forays had worked out poorly. One SL representative was recruited to the politics of the French workerist group Voix Ouvrière, while a bit later in Germany another would-be leader of our international work showed himself to be an unprincipled maneuverer. But from Tweet “you got the straight stuff.” After talking with one group in Britain, she stripped away their pretenses, writing in her reports of their anti-woman “humor” and anti-Irish chauvinism, which are characteristic of the Labour Party milieu.

In the early 1970s, Tweet was political chairman of the Los Angeles branch. She worked to educate, train and assimilate young comrades during that time of rapid recruitment and regroupment, which included a 1971 fusion with the ex-Maoist Communist Working Collective. Also in L.A. in that period, the SL succeeded in winning several important cadres out of a milieu of subjectively revolutionary black militants.

Tweet cut a wide swath in party work, serving on the Central Committee during the 1970s and much of the ’80s and on local executive committees in L.A., the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago. She served as deputy political chairman in the Bay Area local, helping to oversee several trade-union fractions and other areas of work. In 1979, Tweet was part of the SL/U.S. delegation to the first International Conference of our tendency.

After Tweet moved to New York in the early 1990s, periodic bouts of serious ill health slowed her down. But she continued to produce valuable reports on our opponents and frequently phoned local organizers with tips on what such groups were up to. As recently as this summer, Tweet alerted the party to the vile position taken by the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), a group of political counterfeits led by David North, on the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a racist vigilante in Florida. This prompted the polemical article “SEP Denies Racism in Trayvon Martin Killing” (WV No. 1005, 6 July).

Known for her passionate opposition to all forms of special oppression, Tweet had nothing but contempt for the sanctimonious, puritanical straitjacket of bourgeois society, with its anti-sex, anti-gay “morality.” Her moral compass was that of the liberation of all humanity, the fight for a communist world. Tweet was a signatory to a 1969 document titled “The Fight for Women’s Liberation” that was submitted by the RMC to SDS (reprinted in the Young Spartacus pages of WV No. 910, 14 March 2008).

In a 2001 document urging that the party issue more propaganda about AIDS as well as homelessness in America, Tweet, who had a Master of Science nursing degree, observed: “After spending 15 years as a nurse working with AIDS patients it has become clear to me that while the direct cause of the disease is the HIV virus, the reasons for the scale of this epidemic are largely social and political.” She noted, “When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from and your life is totally disorganized, it’s almost impossible to take multiple pills three times a day.” Tweet concluded her document with Lenin’s admonition that the party must be the tribune of the people, actively opposing every kind of oppression and injustice.

Inside the party, we saw another side of Tweet: her great generosity. She regularly provided food to get comrades through long meetings as well as for the Partisan Defense Committee’s annual Holiday Appeal benefits for class-war prisoners. After scouring the thrift stores, Tweet was always replenishing the “free box” in the New York local hall, where comrades can pick up articles of clothing. With her Master of Fine Arts degree, she loved to share her knowledge of art with comrades. Tweet and Dimir’s vacations included visiting major cultural sites in Europe, Egypt and Turkey, as well as connecting with ICL comrades. She loved classical music and read omnivorously, with a special appetite for U.S., Soviet and other novelists around the world.

In a letter to Dimir, a comrade who recently transferred out of the center wrote: “I have difficulty imagining the New York local without her. She livened up many a meeting with her interesting and often provocative remarks and I don’t think we will ever be able to replace her ceaseless muck-raking on the opponents and witty reports on information skillfully gleaned from her sources outside the party.... She was the kind of troublemaker who helped keep the party on its toes and that alone is a huge loss for the ICL.”

As Dimir has recounted to comrades, prior to her most recent illness Tweet said to him: “I have led exactly the kind of life I wanted to.” Tweet was a Bolshevik, an old-school, hard-bitten Spartacist. We salute Tweet, and in her memory we rededicate ourselves to the cause she first embraced as a young woman—that of international proletarian revolution.