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	Workers Vanguard No. 1088	22 April 2016

Spartacist League 14th National Conference

Fighting for Revolutionary Continuity

The Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), held its 14th National Conference on the West Coast in December 2015. The national conference, the highest decision-making meeting of the section, is charged with critically reviewing our past work, assessing disputes and electing a Central Committee to lead the SL until the next conference. In the period before the conference, a number of differences had been resolved through internal struggles against political adaptations to the relentless barrage of bourgeois propaganda. Hence the conference was able to focus much of its work on examining the situation in the U.S., particularly the state of the working class and the outbreak of protests against racist cop terror.

In addition to the main political reports, and the work of amending and adopting the main conference document (“Fighting for Revolutionary Continuity”), a number of commissions were held. These included a presentation and debate on Engels’ pioneering analysis of the development of the family and its central role in the oppression of women. Another commission was a panel critically examining aspects of the work of the American Trotskyists in the mid 1930s during the period of the entry into the Socialist Party. Internal bulletins had been produced to prepare both commissions.

Helping to set the framework for the deliberations of the American section, a plenum of the International Executive Committee of the ICL preceded the conference. There, comrades from Europe and Australia presented reports on Greece, the European Union and China.

Revolutionists today face the pressures of this general historical period shaped by the destruction of the Soviet Union through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92, which ushered in social reaction worldwide. Ideologically, communism is viewed in most countries as utopian, at best. In the U.S. the working class has been battered by decades of defeats; as the trade unions have drastically declined in membership, the union tops have all but ceased to fight for basic principles such as equal pay for equal work. As workers’ gains such as the eight-hour day fade into memory, the rights of black people, women and other oppressed groups are under constant attack. There is a lot of social tinder accumulating at the base of this racist capitalist society, but even those who want to fight see little hope for change and lack any understanding of the central role of the working class in putting an end to capitalism once and for all. They even less understand the need for a proletarian vanguard party.

The document adopted at the conference noted that the great distance between our political program and the existing level of consciousness among workers and the left “creates a tremendous contradiction for us: we want to effect change, but have few means to do so.” As Marx put it: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852]). The central task of the SL/U.S. in this period is to maintain the continuity of revolutionary Marxism today, i.e., Trotskyism, based on the hard-won lessons of past struggles.

Our last national conference, held in 2009, grappled with a series of political adaptations to forces hostile to our proletarian and revolutionary purpose, including black nationalists and elements of the capitalist Democratic Party (see “Fighting for Programmatic Integrity in a Reactionary Period,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 62, Spring 2011). These political departures flowed from a false perspective based on the idealist view that we could overcome difficult objective conditions simply through our own efforts, and were accompanied by a frenzy of activism and disdain for Marxist theory and history. A prime focus of such liquidation was the attempt to substitute our small forces for a nonexistent mass movement to free black political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Political struggle against these departures led to the split of a small minority. Repeatedly in this post-Soviet period, we have had to fight against tendencies to substitute idealism and exhortation for a sober analysis of reality and our relationship to it.

The document from our preceding national conference was necessarily focused centrally on the then-raging factional struggle. In contrast, “Fighting for Revolutionary Continuity” has a more external focus. In particular the document discusses changes in the manufacturing economy, the geographical and ethnic composition of the U.S. working class and the state of the labor movement. Excerpts from this section of the document are published on page 9 (see “Labor and the U.S. Economy”). The document was the product of many months of investigation and discussion and reflects a series of fights over the need for Workers Vanguard to deal with the American reality and produce timely articles on issues arising in the American labor movement; in the absence of big class struggles, such articles were often considered “too difficult” to produce or unimportant.

The conference again underscored our commitment to the production of the biweekly Workers Vanguard as the central work of the organization. The document stated: “WV is essential to our existence as a fighting propaganda group: its frequency allows us to intervene and be a factor as events unfold, influencing the consciousness of the few thousand people who read or peruse our press every two weeks.” Greetings to the conference from other ICL sections stressed the importance of WV, which seeks to uphold revolutionary Marxism in the world’s bloodiest imperialist power, as the flagship newspaper of our international tendency.

U.S. Imperialism: Crazed and Deadly

Comrade Henderson, reporting on U.S. imperialism and its place in the world, highlighted the contradiction between the U.S.’s overwhelming military power and its downsized manufacturing base and decaying infrastructure. The somewhat crazed quality of American imperialist ambitions reflects this contradiction. Although the scale of its economy and its relative stability make the U.S. a major force, its manufacturing prowess and technology have declined relative to its major imperialist competitors, Germany and Japan. The counterpart to expanding U.S. militarism abroad has been increased repression at home, as once supposedly emergency measures become the norm as part of the bourgeoisie’s “war on terror.”

Support at home for the U.S. wars in the Near East is lukewarm, as they seem endless and the bourgeoisie can’t articulate a policy that makes any sense. But the imperialists have succeeded in channeling justified repugnance for the reactionaries of ISIS into popular acceptance of the U.S. drone strikes and other acts of war. It is the U.S. imperialists who are by far the most dangerous and reactionary terrorists on the planet. The conference document reaffirmed: “Every time one of U.S. imperialism’s tentacles is weakened or cut off, every time a blow is struck against the American imperialist monster and its local agents and allies, working people and the oppressed around the world benefit, not least in the U.S. itself.” Over Syria and Iraq, this has meant that revolutionists take a military side with the Islamic State in those instances when it is targeted by the American forces and their local proxies, while not giving any political support to these reactionaries.

The bourgeois political establishment and media are united in beating the drums against capitalist Russia. After the U.S. backed a fascist-led, anti-Russian coup in Ukraine in spring 2014, Russia reincorporated Crimea, with the support of its mostly Russian and Russian-derived population. This marked the first time since the fall of the USSR that a major capitalist country with a significant military stood up to the U.S. The conference document noted: “Although we were initially wrong in making military support for the Russian intervention in Crimea conditional on the Russians recognizing special rights for the Tatars, our line that ‘Crimea is Russian’ was correct, both in taking a clear stand against U.S. imperialist machinations and in affirming an objective truth.” We give no political support to Vladimir Putin’s capitalist regime, which enforces miserable conditions on the working people and brutally oppresses Muslim and other minorities as well as gays.

We seek to swim against the tide of bourgeois opinion, but as regular readers of WV will be aware, we have had to correct political errors on issues including Russia/Ukraine and China. These and other programmatic questions had been vigorously debated at times before becoming largely resolved. However, one individual, ex-comrade Wood, whose increasingly pro-imperialist views had found no support despite his many, many documents circulated internally, instigated his own expulsion by committing a gross provocation during pre-conference discussion.

America and Its Discontents

The eight years following Wall Street’s 2008 economic meltdown have been brutal for working people. But the bitter discontent among workers and youth was not expressed in increased class consciousness, instead giving rise to the diffuse Occupy protests focused on unequal distribution of incomes. Claiming to speak for the “99 percent,” Occupy’s bourgeois-populist outlook dissolved the working class into a sea of have-nots, mixed in with cops, priests and bourgeois politicians. As we predicted at the height of its popularity, this amorphous movement was channeled into the Democratic Party. Today Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders deliberately makes use of Occupy’s well-worn “1 percent” terminology as he seeks to appeal to disaffected voters. The fake-socialist left has been debating whether to explicitly support Sanders or just go on pressuring the Democrats from outside.

In his report on the labor movement, comrade Coburn observed that latent fury is building in the workforce after years of concessions. Last fall the UAW tops’ sellout deal with Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers came close to being rejected, with workers demanding “No More Tiers.” A comrade from the Midwest noted that workers in the parts plants are “very black, very young and very angry” and that the older guys are sympathetic to the young workers. A fighting leadership for the unions will be built through class battles, a task tied to forging a mass revolutionary party of the working class.

In her report on the situation in the U.S., comrade Singer noted that the first black president has presided over worsening conditions: “For the majority of black people, the socioeconomic situation today is comparable to the situation prior to the civil rights movement. Now we have seen blowback over the last year—mass protests all over the country against wanton police terror.”

Intersecting some of these demonstrations, we argue that the cause of black liberation must be linked to the struggle of the multiracial working class against capitalist exploitation. However, our tiny propaganda group does not have the social weight to influence the mass of protesters, and circumstances have not up to this point created a left-moving layer of activists. For now, our task is to propagate a Marxist worldview and seek to recruit individual students and young workers.

Of course, it is not a new phenomenon that the cops shoot down black people. The document adopted at our 1994 national conference observed that “cop terror is increasingly the means by which the capitalist class resolves the contradiction between black people’s achievement of formal legal equality and capitalism’s need to forcibly segregate this race-color caste at the rock bottom of society.” Speakers at the conference addressed the need to raise demands that pose collective struggle for integration—such as low-rent, quality, integrated public housing and free, quality, integrated public education for all—as an essential part of the fight for socialist revolution in America.

Comrade Singer’s report also took up Ta-Nehisi Coates and his best-selling book Between the World and Me. Her remarks (which informed our subsequent article on Coates in WV No. 1083, 12 February) refuted the myth of “white skin privilege” which Coates purveys:

“In the context of necessary anger at racial oppression in America, the theory serves a powerful purpose in obscuring the class line and, importantly, equating the white poor and working class with the white ruling class, united in ‘privilege’—all guilty, if you will. We all know that black people are a race-color caste, subject to worse conditions than whites in general in this country. But this understanding has nothing to do with the argument that whites materially benefit from black oppression. The latter is a program to absolve the capitalist class that does materially benefit off the oppression of black people.”

The conference document noted: “Most black workers continue to have the hardest jobs at the bottom of the pay scale. But blacks continue to be unionized at higher rates than whites (13.6 percent versus 10.8 percent) and are also represented disproportionately in key occupations: longshore, manufacturing and transit.” It remains true that, as we noted in “Black and Red” (Spartacist No. 10, May-June 1967): “The struggle of the Black people of this country for freedom, while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is more than that struggle.” Due to their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section of the working class, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in an American workers revolution.

From the inception of our organization, we have been guided by our understanding that reaching specially oppressed layers of the working people requires special organizational efforts. The understanding of the need for transitional organizations as a bridge to the revolutionary party goes back to the early, revolutionary Communist International. In the 1980s, the Spartacist League was able to initiate a number of militant labor-black united-front mobilizations spiking the efforts of the KKK and other fascists to stage provocations in major cities. Black trade unionists and youth were the core of the demonstration of thousands which drove the Klan off the streets of Washington, D.C., on 27 November 1982. In the aftermath of this demonstration, we launched the Labor Black Leagues for Social Defense. But in the absence of broader, sustained class and social struggles, the LBLs were only sporadically active. This conference recognized that the LBLs are moribund at the present time, but we would look to reconstitute such transitional organizations to meet a future upsurge in struggle.

The conference adopted a significant change in describing our perspective of building “a 70 percent black party,” which we will now express as “a 70 percent black, Latino and other minority party.” The original formulation was adopted at our national conference in 1983 to express the centrality of the black freedom struggle in building a revolutionary party in this country. Recent decades of immigration have changed the demographics of especially the South and Midwest. This fact is both demographic and political. Immigrants bring their own traditions, which are often of trade-union and leftist militancy, to their native-born class brothers and provide as well a human bridge to workers internationally.

This modified formulation of a “70 percent black, Latino and other minority party” does not alter our understanding of the centrality of the black question in America, as expressed in our program and codified in our slogan for “black liberation through socialist revolution.” Built on the bedrock of black slavery, which was overthrown only by a Civil War, this country has black oppression woven through its history, its economy and every social institution.

As comrade Singer pointed out, if you imagine soviets in the U.S. (that is, workers councils like those that emerged in the Russian Revolution) they would be disproportionately made up of these minority layers, and a mass revolutionary workers party would reflect that. Such a social composition is necessary to overcome the deep racial and ethnic divisions in the working class. In 1892 Friedrich Engels observed that the American bourgeoisie was a master at playing off successive layers of immigrants against each other.

Women’s Liberation, Marxism and the Family

At the conference, special attention was given to the causes of a liberal flinch last spring over a draft of the article “Communism and the Family” (subsequently published in WV Nos. 1068 and 1069, 15 and 29 May 2015). At that time, opposition emerged to the article’s polemical explanation of our historic position on women and the family, particularly on the question of collectivization of childrearing. As the article explains, we stand for the creation of a global communist society, that is:

“a fully free, communal society in which sexual life is independent of access to food, shelter, education and every daily need and comfort. When the family has withered away along with classes and the state, the communal upbringing that replaces it will lead to a new psychology and culture among the people that grow up in those conditions. Patriarchal social values—‘my’ wife, ‘my’ children—will vanish along with the oppressive system that spawned them. The relationship of children to one another and to the persons who teach and guide them will be many-sided, complex and dynamic. It is the institution of the family that ties sex and love to property, with anything other than the straitjacket of heterosexual monogamy branded as ‘sin’.”

Some comrades argued that the polemics in the draft article would be beyond the comprehension of our political opponents or that arguing with them about such fundamentals meant taking their socialist posturing for good coin. Underlying those arguments was a reluctance to defend the uncompromising program of our Marxist forebears on the family and the road to women’s liberation.

The historic Marxist position that the family is the central social institution oppressing women is drawn from Engels’ 1884 work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Drawing on pioneering anthropological work of the time, especially the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, Engels showed that in the organization of early human society, men’s and women’s work and social roles were equally valued, but that with the development of economic surplus, the female sex was dispossessed alongside the rise of private property, classes and the state. This was “the world-historic defeat of the female sex.” Engels stressed that the emancipation of women could come about only through socialist revolution.

In the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Russian working class destroyed the class rule of the landlords and capitalists and established a workers state, the beginning of liberation for all the working masses including the doubly oppressed women toilers. The early Soviet regime took immediate steps toward liberating women from ignorance, inequality and the hold of religion. The old legal code governing matters such as marriage and divorce was overthrown; all laws against consensual sexual activity, including homosexuality, were immediately abolished. Insofar as they were able amid poverty, backwardness and the massive destruction caused by the civil war, the revolutionary regime established communal institutions—not only childcare but also communal kitchens and laundries—aimed at liberating women from stultifying individual household labors. The effort to replace the functions of the family by collective institutions was the most radical aspect of early Communist progress on the woman question.

In this post-Soviet period, the woman question has been a huge lightning rod for reaction generally. The document adopted at the SL/U.S. conference examined the domestic social context in which the opposition to the draft WV article arose: “Much as the gains of the working class have been attacked, so have basic rights for women, as seen in the rollback of abortion rights and the bourgeoisie’s puritanical anti-sex campaigns. While we defend the right of gay marriage (and divorce), it’s a sign of the times that liberals fought for it under the banner of ‘family values,’ ideologically unifying them with the Republican right wing and the reactionary Supreme Court.”

At the commission meeting on Origin of the Family, Amy Rath, the editor of the Women and Revolution pages in Spartacist, summarized some controversies going back many years concerning aspects of Engels’ book and the scholarship on which it was based. Other comrades presented their differing views. A focus of controversy was the relationship between women’s childbearing role and the development of their subordination within the institution of the patriarchal family. Comrade Rath observed: “Engels drew from Morgan and other non-Marxist scholars of the time.... Like most pioneering studies, Origin makes some guesses that in the light of subsequent knowledge need to be revised to a closer approximation.” She reaffirmed that Engels “laid the theoretical basis for the Marxist understanding of the woman question and how to achieve her emancipation through proletarian, socialist revolution.” The conference endorsed comrade Rath’s 1999 letter “On the Origins of Women’s Oppression” (see WV No. 727, 14 January 2000) and projected a future article incorporating this rich material.

The discussion on the woman question also underscored that our propaganda needs to constantly make clear that “reforms are not our goal—not even a workers government is our goal, but a means to our goal, which is a global communist society,” as comrade Rath stated. At the conference, comrade Joseph Seymour addressed this point in a special presentation on propaganda. He underscored that leftist intellectuals and reformist socialist organizations today do not even claim to share our goal of liberating human potential through a global communist society. He observed: “Our polemics are not informed by the fact that the mainly student youth who now join the Workers World or the ISO [International Socialist Organization] are not attracted to, and do not even understand, the concept of a global communist civilization in the Marxist sense. They have joined these groups because they agree with the policies that they advocate, or alternatively oppose, within the existing capitalist-imperialist system. That defines their mental framework.” Rather than polemicizing against reformist left organizations the same way we did in the 1960s and 1970s, comrade Seymour argued: “To adequately explain the various aspects of a future communist society, and a transition to it, requires a substantive, multifaceted body of party literature.”

The Struggle for Continuity

The Fourth International, founded in 1938 under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, based its program on the lessons drawn from the experience of the first four Congresses of the Communist International. We seek to carry forward this program today; our perspective is to reforge the Fourth International, destroyed in 1951-53 by a revisionist current that denied the need for Trotskyist proletarian vanguard parties, choosing instead to tail Stalinist and Third World nationalist forces.

Our founding cadre came out of the Revolutionary Tendency, which fought in the early 1960s against the degeneration of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Trotskyist organization in this country until its political convergence with revisionism (see “Genesis of Pabloism,” Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972). For a period of more than five decades, half of it under the adverse historical circumstances marked by the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, the Spartacist tendency has maintained a revolutionary program, longer than any other Marxist formation in history.

The core of our cadre was won to Trotskyism in the period of radicalization spurred by the civil rights movement and then by the U.S.’s losing war in Vietnam. In subsequent decades, new recruits came more slowly, creating our current generational problem. Forging a new generation of revolutionary leaders is fundamental to maintaining our revolutionary continuity. As comrade Henderson observed in his report: “The struggle for continuity is twofold: in the first instance, maintaining our revolutionary program here in the most powerful imperialist country on the planet, and, second, effecting a leadership transition to a new generation which does not have the political depth and experience of the historic leaders of our tendency.” He noted that “senior comrades still play a crucial, and often decisive, role in sorting out knotty political questions, but the day-to-day central leadership functions are mainly carried out by a younger generation of comrades.”

We also have a promising layer of younger cadres, but our affiliated youth groups, the Spartacus Youth Clubs, are small and only sporadically active. The recent near-disappearance of Young Spartacus pages in WV reflected this reality. The conference voted to disband the Youth Commission, the body that had been responsible for overseeing the production of the youth pages. In the next period, WV editorial will oversee the production of youth- and campus-related propaganda, using a Young Spartacus masthead as appropriate. Our young cadres, who in another period might have been writers for the youth press, are taking on party responsibilities in WV and as organizers, treasurers, trade unionists and on international assignment. In light of our paucity of resources, a meeting of the incoming Central Committee following the conference authorized the production, in cases of emergency, of eight-page issues of Workers Vanguard, rather than our usual 12 pages.

The SL is faced with a generational transition in a period characterized by a regression in political consciousness and a low level of class and social struggle. The document noted:

“Since we are in an unusually deep trough, the experiences that are immediately available to us are not very good. It helps to look to the experiences of the workers movement in 1917-21 when it stood on a relative mountain in order to critically assimilate the lessons codified by the Communist International. In the ICL we trace our continuity from this period through the SWP and the Revolutionary Tendency. Comrade Robertson once observed:

“‘It’s very thin, comrades, this continuity. And it seems to me and has always seemed to me that to be a good communist requires two components, each of which is necessary. One is akin to the university students, that is the mastery of the texts: to know, to read, to study, to be able to have the historic precedents through book learning at one’s fingertips. And the other is analogous to the apprenticeship program where you learn by doing under the direction and supervision of those who know better than you.’

“We are thin on both counts. Given the extended trough in social and class struggle, for the new generation of cadres book learning is especially necessary, but has been rather insufficient.”

Our international theoretical journal Spartacist remains key, particularly in the extension, application and clarification of the lessons of the history of the Marxist movement. The Prometheus Research Library (PRL), our archive and the laboratory for Spartacist, containing politically invaluable holdings of our party, its antecedents and the workers movement, is crucial to help us understand our place in history.

A highlight of the proceedings was the panel on the American Trotskyists in 1936-37, during the period of entry in the Socialist Party, which has been little documented. The discussion was informed by documents discovered in various archives, including the PRL, but to date we have been able to examine only a small fraction of them. It is becoming clear that in this period, the seeds were planted for the 1939-40 faction fight in the SWP, where the majority led by James P. Cannon defended Trotskyism against a petty-bourgeois opposition led by Max Shachtman, James Burnham and Martin Abern, who repudiated the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union. The panelists addressed the SP entry and other aspects of the Trotskyists’ work at that time: trade-union work, notably in the Sailors Union of the Pacific; and political bending toward the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, a two-class party. Some initial impressions were offered concerning the approach to the question of black oppression.

At the end of its deliberations, the conference elected a Central Committee including both senior, authoritative leaders and the younger leaders now running the organization on a daily basis. James Robertson was elected National Chairman (Consultative). In recognition of her leading role, comrade Williams was elected National Chairman; among other officers, comrade Singer was elected National Secretary. John Blake was appointed Editor of Workers Vanguard.

In our commitment to reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution, we stand on the words of Leon Trotsky:

“To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives—these are the rules of the Fourth International.”

—The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938)

The conference concluded with the singing of the “Internationale.”