The Struggle Against Parliamentarism, Sectarianism

Communist Policy in Bourgeois Elections

Reprinted from Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard No. 835, 29 October 2004.

We print below a slightly edited educational presentation given by comrade Mary Ann Clemens to the Bay Area Spartacus Youth Club on 21 October 2003. Though delivered at the time of the California gubernatorial recall election last autumn, the material comrade Clemens presented is quite relevant to the upcoming general elections and beyond. The presentation fleshes out our own use of the tactic of critical support in California last fall. At the time, we wrote in WV No. 810 (26 September 2003):

"We originally decided to abstain on the recall because we want neither to support a capitalist politician, in this case the Democratic governor, nor to implicitly support a capitalist (likely Republican) replacement. The SWP's election platform, which presents, in however crude a way, a working-class line, allows us to make concrete and clear-cut our opposition to Davis while at the same time expressing our opposition to the Republicans' attempted electoral coup."

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In preparing this class, in view of the party's attitude and our change in position on the California recall election, it occurred to me that we are dealing with much more than the lessons of Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. This book, and our recent experience, raise the question of the ABCs: What is communist work? What is our job about? These questions were fought out in the newly formed Communist International (Comintern) and its developing member parties. So I thought it would be helpful to start by giving a brief idea of where the American party came from.

1919

1919 was a busy year in the international workers movement. It was the height of the wave of post-World War I international labor radicalism, inspired by the Russian October Revolution. The "Spartacus" uprising of revolutionary workers took place in Germany; the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic was founded and crushed. The Communist International was founded. Amid the wave of strikes that swept through the U.S. was the Seattle general strike. The bourgeoisie paid back these struggles in kind, with massive repression. As a result of the "Palmer raids," a centerpiece of the American ruling class' "red scare," the government imprisoned large numbers of militant leftists and labor activists and deported numerous foreign-born leftists under the infamous "criminal syndicalism" laws. The bosses played the race card for all it was worth, too. The year 1919 saw the Chicago anti-black pogrom, as well as many others across the country. In Chicago, the backdrop was a bitterly fought organizing drive in the meatpacking industry, during which the bosses used racism as a wedge between black and white workers.

There was tumult in the socialist movement in 1919. A major realignment of the left was taking place around this time all over Europe. In the U.S., the left wing split precipitously from the American Socialist Party (SP). In this country, Louis Fraina was one of the two main figures in the American left-wing socialist milieu. He founded the Communist Party of America (CPA). Seven foreign-language federations from the SP dominated his organization. The workers in this organization didn't speak much English—the membership were Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Letts (Latvians), Estonians, Poles, Russians, etc., who had grown up in the clandestine conditions of heavy-handed repression in the tsarist empire. The other leading figure was the radical journalist John Reed, and James P. Cannon, the future American Trotskyist leader, soon joined him. Reed's organization was the Communist Labor Party (CLP). The problem was that they had split from the SP too soon, cutting themselves off from a layer of socialists, many of whom could have been won over to communism by a resolute political struggle within the Socialist Party.

Sterile Ultraleftism

They were for class struggle, all right, but the politics of both of these young communist groups can be characterized as sterile ultraleftism. They had been much influenced by two Dutch social-democratic "left-wingers," Anton Pannekoek and Hermann Gorter, and by Daniel De Leon of the American Socialist Labor Party.

So what did the CPA and CLP do? In response to the vicious assaults of the Palmer raids, they went underground and denied any possibility of ever working as a legal party. Second, the CPA and CLP refused on principle to work inside the reactionary trade unions and instead called for forming ideologically untainted "red" unions (a policy known as "dual unionism"). Their line on trade unions was pretty much "Destroy the AFL!" The American Federation of Labor's program was "partnership" between the capitalists and the workers. Now, the AFL's base was among the skilled crafts. As a rule, it did not try to organize the unskilled in mass industrial unions, and many of the AFL's unions discriminated against black workers.

Third, the CPA and CLP refused to fight for partial demands in the course of the struggle for socialism and regarded that as trimming their program. And last but not least, they were bitterly antiparliamentarist—they wouldn't be caught dead in the same room with a member of Congress, much less think of running for legislative office. These politics were quite similar to those of Amadeo Bordiga, a left-winger in the Italian SP who became an early leader of the Italian Communist Party and who played an important role at the Second World Congress of the Communist International.

The still separate organizations selected Fraina and Reed as delegates to the Second Congress. First Reed and then Fraina took off on the months-long, dangerous trip to Moscow. In the meantime, the struggle for the fusion of these two American groups and against their ultraleft politics raged at the urging of Lenin and the Communist International. The Comintern had to win this fight if a Communist Party was to be built in the U.S. James P. Cannon was the first of the American leaders who began to get it. He gave a powerful speech against dual unionism at a U.S. convention in May 1920. And at that convention, the CLP and a split from the CPA fused to form the United Communist Party. This is a month before the Second Congress and a month before Lenin published "Left-Wing" Communism.

The Second Congress of the Communist International

News of the fights going on in the U.S. didn't reach Moscow until the Congress was in full swing. So Reed and Fraina both hit town in a fighting mood, each operating with an agenda to "get the franchise" from the Comintern as the official U.S. section. Reed was hot to wage battle against the Comintern's position in favor of working in the reactionary trade unions. He argued with the Comintern leadership and proposed from the floor of the Congress a change in the agenda, so the discussion on parliamentarism would come before that on the trade unions and shop committees. He also wanted English added as an official language for this point. His motion was defeated on the floor, but, in fact, the agenda was reorganized pretty much as he proposed. As for the reports, the Comintern leadership requested that Reed prepare a report on the Negro question in the U.S. Fraina got the assignment to make the report on the trade-union question.

Bourgeois historians like Theodore Draper like to portray the whole debate with Reed as an emotional power struggle. But the discussion on the American black question that the Comintern leadership insistently organized with Reed as reporter was also a historic moment in the development of American Communism. The Bolsheviks struggled with the American Communists to make a complete break from the indifference to black oppression and even outright racism of significant elements of the Socialist Party. They taught the Americans that the struggle to address the black question was the key to the American revolution. The Comintern leadership exhibited great skill in using the American delegates as resources in the struggles over the great questions before them. They changed the agenda of the American delegates, guided the trade-union discussion carefully and gave Reed quite a different and unique responsibility. The international leadership saw to it that he gave the Congress and the American Communist movement the best he had to offer.

Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin's report at the Second Congress of the Comintern, the "Theses on the Communist Parties and Parliamentarism" and the intervention of the Bulgarian delegate, Shablin, are well worth reading. Bukharin, in explaining the theses, counterposes the previous epoch, the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe in the last decades of the 19th century, to the new epoch of imperialism. Bukharin explains the process of bureaucratization of the Socialist parties toward the end of the last epoch. The parties focused increasingly on getting more and more votes and putting more socialist delegates in parliament, to force through more and more reforms to improve the living standard of the working class.

In the epoch of the rise of capitalism, "parliament to a certain extent accomplished a historically progressive task as a tool of developing capitalism," as the theses on parliamentarism state. It was indeed in the capitalists' interests that the working class should at least be able to reproduce itself, which in the epoch of early capitalism was not always the case. Take the Polish-speaking linen weavers in Silesia just before the 1848 Revolution. They were squeezed dry by the rapacious German Junkers, their feudal overlords; their cottage industry was ruined by the competition of mechanized weaving, particularly in England. So they came out of their hovels and dank cellars, starving, freezing, in rags, barefoot, filthy, racked by epidemics, rose up, smashed everything in sight, including the looms, and ransacked the Junkers' great houses. After the bloody suppression, the Prussian government inspectors noticed that the majority of adult males in the region were physically incapable of...serving in the army. So in this epoch it was possible to fight for major, lasting reforms. This is where, for example, fights originated, later waged by the German socialists, against child labor, for protective legislation for women, for disability insurance, for a shorter workday, universal suffrage, etc.

But gradually, the Socialist Party apparatuses, with a large fraction of their leading cadre respectably sitting in parliaments and with intimate ties to the pro-capitalist trade-union tops, grew together with state agencies. Daniel De Leon, for all his sectarian politics, was a great political leader of his time, and he commanded considerable respect from Lenin—De Leon coined the term we use today, "labor lieutenants of the capitalist class," to characterize the trade-union bureaucrats. Bukharin puts it like this: "What the reformists refer to as a growing over into socialism was the working class and the workers' organizations growing over into the bourgeois state apparatus" (The Communist International in Lenin's Time—Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress [1920], [Pathfinder, 1991]). More precisely, the politics of the bureaucratized leaderships became a component of capitalist rule, clothed in the criminal myth that socialism was attainable by gradually taking over capitalist society through sheer numbers—by socialist delegates "taking over" parliament.

From the Russian 1905 Revolution to World War I

With the 20th century, Europe entered the epoch of wars and revolutions—the imperialist epoch marked by the decay of capitalism. The Bolsheviks under Lenin had forged a programmatically hard party through struggles over more than a decade, and they definitively broke from the mainstream and right-wing Social Democrats in 1912. In contrast, according to the model of a socialist party put forward by German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, the "party of the whole class" was supposed to encompass all political tendencies of the proletariat, including reformism. Between 1905 and 1914, the European workers organizations fractured and regrouped within their parties into three main camps. In the right-wing camp were those who had become servants of the capitalist system, and on the left, there were those, looking to the 1905 Revolution in Russia, who had become instruments of the class struggle. And in the middle was the "center," led by people like Karl Kautsky, who acted as a barrier between the base and revolutionary Marxism. The Social Democratic parliamentary fractions reflected that polarization.

Splitting the Socialist parties wasn't so easy. When the war broke out on 4 August 1914, the revolutionary Karl Liebknecht in the German parliament on the first round voted with the rest of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) fraction to support the government's war credits. He had to overcome his shock at the prospect of breaking party discipline. The class line now separated the program of reformism from the revolutionary ideas of the left wing. His subsequent "No" votes expressed determination to remain true to the interests of the working class. But the European socialist left wings were at that time unable to draw the organizational conclusion and strike out anew. They lacked a clear understanding of the new epoch, the new tasks before the party, a new conception of the party on the Bolshevik model, that is to say a revolutionary vanguard party fighting for working-class state power.

The question of how revolutionary consciousness develops divided many of the ultralefts in the Social Democratic parties from the Communists. They believed that spontaneously, as Clara Zetkin quoted one German left-winger, "the working class will create for itself the revolutionary class party and the leadership that it needs" when the revolutionary wave rises. Not only the German left, but members of the socialist left in other countries as well, had to be broken from these conceptions through a series of political struggles waged by Lenin and the Comintern.

Parenthetically, I believe that the official history of the workers movement always bought into the myth of universal pro-war enthusiasm in the European population at the outbreak of World War I, and exaggerated the extent of the hysterical social-patriotism and social-chauvinism. The tops of the European Socialist parties and the trade unions linked arms with the bourgeoisie in this orgy after 4 August 1914. The skilled workers, who constituted an important part of the base of the German SPD, were most prone to the SPD leaders' logic that "we are defending our national borders as the borders in which to build German socialism," etc. But the pro-war outpouring did not include the broad industrial working class. In the 1990s, a couple of books came out examining working-class response in Germany to the outbreak of the war. The newspaper reports and photographs of big pro-war demonstrations in the major cities, the proletarian concentrations, show only the upper classes and reactionary students! The workers remained tense but subdued, since their leaders, including the left-wingers in the Socialist parties, were in disarray. Without leadership, the workers eventually became demoralized. (See Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: The Myth of Enthusiasm and the Rhetoric of Unity in World War I Germany [PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1991].) But even after the Socialist leaderships' betrayal and the mass slaughter of the war, the Socialist parties retained important parts of their revolutionary-minded working-class base.

In each country the splits toward the Comintern were different. But in general, the new Communist parties founded beginning in 1918 and 1919 were heterogeneous and contained two or three mutually antagonistic future parties. In most cases, the task before the Comintern in 1920 was to get real Communist parties out of the mishmash. That meant propelling programmatic struggles forward in these parties, so that the revolutionary-minded left wings could coalesce and rid the party of its centrists and pro- capitalist reformists and opportunists. At the other end, there was the American party, dominated by sectarian abstentionist politics and ultraleft wings or independent formations such as in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands.

Bolshevik Position on Participation in Parliaments

The point the Comintern Congress had to make clear regarding "revolutionary parliamentarism" was that it was the antithesis of the parliamentarism of the Second International, the international grouping of social democrats that had included both revolutionaries and reformists, from which the Communists had split. The Bolsheviks explained at the Congress that the obvious primary concentration of a Communist Party's work is among the working and oppressed masses. But parliamentary work constitutes a legitimate auxiliary arena of work that must be used as a multiplier to make the revolutionary program known and respected. Parliament is for us a forum to be used as Karl Liebknecht did, to pose every question from the standpoint of the interests of the working class and oppressed, so that our program reaches millions. When you read "Left-Wing" Communism and documents such as the "Organizational Resolution" ("Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work," adopted by the Third Congress of the Comintern, 1921, Prometheus Research Series No. 1 [1988]), there is a big emphasis on the combination of illegal and legal work. You have to remember that for the Bolsheviks, working under conditions of illegality, their participation in the Duma (the Russian parliament) was the main arena of legal work where members of the Bolsheviks could be publicly identified with the party.

The Bolsheviks recognized that the tsarist Duma was an impotent talk shop. As the Comintern theses put it, "Under present-day conditions of unbridled imperialism...parliament has been transformed into a tool of lies, deceit, violence, and enervating drivel" whose reforms have lost all significance for the working masses. Nevertheless, Lenin explains that the Bolsheviks almost always participated in some way in the Duma elections throughout the years before the proletarian revolution. In September-November 1917, they took part in the elections to the capitalist government's Constituent Assembly—on the eve of the October Revolution. Rarely during these years—such as in the events that culminated in the outbreak of the unsuccessful 1905 Revolution—was the tactic of boycott correct. In 1906, the Bolsheviks abstained, and Lenin fought for the party to recognize this as an error. A formative struggle took place in 1907-09 against the ultraleft Bolsheviks, known as the Boycotters, over participating in the elections at a time when it was crucial to use the Duma as an agitational platform while the party retrenched in a reactionary period. The Bolsheviks always worked out a position on the Duma elections, developed the tactics for participating, ran candidates, called conferences, demonstrations and on and on.

The objective situation before the party in every election is obviously different. The point is, there was no recipe for the Bolsheviks then, and there are no recipes for us now. We have to figure it out, each time. This is of course true in general, not only in working out how to intervene in a bourgeois election campaign. And this raises the ABCs of communist work. Making the commitment to join the movement and become a Bolshevik means that in addition to learning the history of the workers movement, you must learn to struggle with today's reality constantly and form an opinion as a communist. To do that you must inform yourself. Read the papers—the bourgeois papers. Listen to the news from NPR and BBC, from the point of view of a communist.

The "Organizational Resolution" from the Third Congress of the Comintern states:

"For a communist party there is no time when the party organization cannot be politically active. The organizational exploitation of every political and economic situation, and of every change in these situations, must be developed into organizational strategy and tactics."

— "Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work," Prometheus Research Series No. 1

Communists have a compass, the revolutionary program, and the leadership in whatever task, be it in the trade unions, be it in running candidates for parliament, must be guided by that program:

"The art of communist organization consists in making use of everything and everyone in the proletarian class struggle, distributing party work suitably among all party members and using the membership to continually draw ever wider masses of the proletariat into the revolutionary movement, while at the same time keeping the leadership of the entire movement firmly in hand, not by virtue of power but by virtue of authority, i.e., by virtue of energy, greater experience, greater versatility, greater ability."

The resolution closes with an admonition for every cadre to keep sight of our historic goals:

"The communist organizer regards every single party member and every revolutionary worker from the outset as he will be in his future historic role as soldier in our combat organization at the time of the revolution. Accordingly, he guides him in advance into that nucleus and that work which best corresponds to his future position and type of weapon. His work today must also be useful in itself, necessary for today's struggle, not merely a drill which the practical worker today does not understand. This same work, however, is also in part training for the important demands of tomorrow's final struggle."

The Italian Party at the Second World Congress

The Italian party badly needed sorting out. The leadership under Giacinto Serrati, who had led the party into the Comintern, was refusing to break with the reformist right wing. (In fact, Serrati remained adamant and when the CP split the next year, he went with the reformists.) In addition, they had an ultraleft opposition led by Bordiga that he had named the "Communist-Abstentionist" faction, also known as the "Left Abstentionist Opposition." Bordiga performed a very useful function at the Congress, giving a minority report on parliamentarism. His arguments served as a good foil for the discussion on ultraleftism.

Bordiga's reaction to the Bolsheviks' position on parliamentarism, understandable since the reformists were still in the party, was, "What? More of the same? No way!" This was just a knee-jerk reaction to the shameful betrayal of the pre-war right Social Democrats, and to bourgeois ideology that paints "political activity" as existing in parliament and nowhere else. He did not have the Bolsheviks' conception of the party, which he regarded more or less as a product of Russian exceptionalism. He did not understand how consciousness is formed and changes in class society. For him, the revolution must first destroy parliament. Then, so to speak, the Communist revolutionaries, kind of courageous adventurers, march through the factories with the red flag, calling for the proletarian revolution to galvanize the masses for the final struggle. But real events, real class and social struggles and real participation in such fights change consciousness among the working class.

So at the Congress Bordiga was subjected to hard political criticism when he objected that it was impossible to say anything in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, that work there was impossible and traitorous by definition. Bordiga maintained that parliamentary democracy is obsolete, etc., etc. Bukharin said:

"Comrade Bordiga says it is technically impossible to make use of parliament, but he must prove that. No one will say that under tsarism we had better conditions in our Duma than exist today in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. No one has tried to speak in the Italian chamber in the necessary way. Why then do you assert, a priori, that it is impossible? Try it first—create some scandals; let them arrest you; have a political trial in the grand style. You have done none of that. This tactic must be developed to an ever higher degree. And I maintain that this is possible."

— The Communist International in Lenin's Time–Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress

The Dutch left had also long maintained that parliamentarism was "politically obsolete." Lenin made a simple, realistic distinction: bourgeois parliamentary democracy is in fact "historically obsolete." But in terms of social and political reality, it is far from obsolete as long as millions of workers are voting for bourgeois candidates. As long as that is true,

"...participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses. Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life; otherwise you risk turning into nothing but windbags."

— V.I. Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, 1920, Collected Works Vol. 31 (1966)

The Task of Communists

On the question of "dual unions" and the refusal of many ultralefts to work in the reactionary trade unions, Lenin pointed to the source of their error. They equated the pro-capitalist tops of the unions with their base—which consisted then as now of various strata of workers whom the communists are obligated to reach.

The central task of the communists, from which the need for a vanguard party arises, is to bring communist consciousness into the class from the outside. Of itself, without this intervention of the party, the subjective factor in history, the working class cannot attain socialist consciousness spontaneously, but at most develops trade-union consciousness—which is still bourgeois consciousness. That means that their consciousness is limited to negotiating the terms of wage slavery as opposed to the consciousness of the need to overturn wage slavery. Because of the vastly differing conditions under which its members work, the consciousness of the working class is very heterogeneous. The layers in the working class range from the most politically advanced elements in the industrial proletariat to backward layers among whom religious obscurantism, racism and male chauvinism are rampant. This is because the bourgeoisie has a monopoly of social institutions to transmit its ideology to the entire population, and it pounds the entire population daily, hourly through the media, the schools, religious institutions, sports. And above all, the ruling class uses the family to pass on subservience to authority, obedience, etc.

"Compromises" and Our Reformist Opponents

Young communists should study carefully the section on compromises in Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) obscenely baits us with it, using the book to justify their support of bourgeois forces and politicians like Ralph Nader.

Lenin points out that under capitalist imperialism, from the heterogeneity of consciousness arises

"the absolute necessity for the Communist Party, the vanguard of the proletariat, its class-conscious section, to resort to changes of tack, to conciliation and compromises with the various groups of proletarians, with the various parties of the workers and small masters. It is entirely a matter of knowing how to apply these tactics in order to raise—not lower—the general level of proletarian class-consciousness, revolutionary spirit, and ability to fight and win."

Now, the "changes of tack, conciliations and compromises" Lenin is talking about here are with "the various groups of proletarians." Lenin's point is that centrist and occasionally even reformist parties vacillate between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The effect of our tactics, such as our use of critical support in the California recall campaign last autumn, is to drive the wedge in precisely when an organization on the left turns (in its publicly stated program) toward the workers, and to combat those that are on their knees before the bourgeoisie.

In the recall election, with the exception of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the ISO and all the other "left" groups oriented to the ruling class. They supported candidates committed to the reform of capitalism, to pressure the capitalists and their state to be nice to the workers and oppressed—the capitalist Green Party's Peter Camejo (an ex-fake Trotskyist), C.T. Weber (Peace and Freedom Party), etc., etc. We pointed out that their fanning illusions in such forces in no way represents the independent interests of the working class, raising the class consciousness of the youth and working class and their ability to fight, but instead lowers it. By giving critical support to the SWP's candidate, Joel Britton, we sought to draw toward us youth and workers whose heart was with the proletariat. Of course we know the SWP will turn around and plead with the bourgeoisie to make nicey-nice tomorrow, but what they wrote in their program for the recall elections, what they claimed to stand on, drew a crude class line, so that we could say, that's good, we can support that—not that we expect them to put their money where their mouth is. And in so doing, we could go into action, intervene, counterpose our own consistently working-class revolutionary program.

Cannon noted in The First Ten Years of American Communism that antiparliamentarism along the lines of the European ultralefts was present in a weaker form in the first program of the Communist Party in the U.S. But "that hodgepodge of ultra-radicalism was practically wiped out of the American movement in 1920-21 by Lenin." The American leaders were broken from the influence of De Leon and the Dutch ultralefts primarily by Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism and by the Comintern theses and resolutions of the Second World Congress.

The American SWP in 1940

One of the readings for this class was the discussion printed in the Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40) between the SWP leadership and Trotsky. The fight, though on one level about electoral tactics, revealed adaptations to the anti-Communist Rooseveltian trade unionists, whom the SWP encountered in the course of their trade-union work.

Trotsky pounded the SWP's inexcusable abstention from the presidential elections dominated by Roosevelt:

"I see there is no campaign in the Socialist Appeal for a workers' candidate. Why haven't you proposed a congress of trade unions, a convention to nominate a candidate for the presidency? If he were independent we would support him. We cannot remain completely indifferent. We can very well insist in unions where we have influence that Roosevelt is not our candidate and the workers must have their own candidate. We should demand a nationwide congress connected with the independent labor party."

Trotsky pointed out that it was principled and could be tactically smart to support the American Communist Party's candidate, Earl Browder. After the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, the American Communist Party (CP), like the Stalinists internationally, had dropped the social-patriotic line of their Popular Front period. Instead of looking for alliances with a wing of the bourgeoisie against fascists or "reactionaries" in general, they adopted an antiwar, anti-imperialist stance. That offered the Trotskyists an opening to drive a wedge into the contradictions of the Stalinist tops' politics.

Trotsky patiently explained how the International Left Opposition [precursor of the Trotskyist Fourth International] was not politically closer to the Socialist parties in 1933 than to the CPs in 1940, but that the Trotskyists had then entered the reformist SPs in a maneuver called the "French Turn," designed to win away their left-wing elements. (That maneuver was so successful in the U.S. that it gutted the SP for good.) Trotsky asked: Since the CP won't let the SWP enter it, why not conduct a similar maneuver from the outside?

Trotsky hammered the SWP for not exploiting the CP's contradictions, asking the delegation what kind of policy they wanted—negative or dynamic politics:

"If you are an independent party you must have politics, a line in relation to this campaign. If you had an independent candidate I would be for him, but where is he? It is either complete abstention from the campaign because of technical reasons, or you must choose between Browder and Norman Thomas [the SP's candidate]. We can accept abstention.... We can proclaim that everyone is a faker. That is one thing, but events confirming our proclamation is another. Shall we follow negative or dynamic politics?... We must have our own politics. Imagine the effect on the Stalinist rank and file...."

But no matter what Trotsky suggested, the SWP leaders, shocked at the thought of politically going after the Stalinists, reacted with "but...but": The "peculiar" Stalinist movement was hated by labor militants. Giving them critical support would "discredit the Trotskyists in the labor movement." The Stalinists would only "betray again." "The CP is not a genuine workers' party." Cannon argued that "the progressives will hate us if we support the Stalinists," showing where the SWP's trade-union policy was oriented.

Trotsky presented one tactical possibility after another, to try to get the SWP leaders to see the great flexibility available to them: They could publish a manifesto directed at the Stalinist workers, but there was so far not "even one single word from you on policy in regard to the presidential election." The members of the party could write letters to the editor of the SWP supporters' trade-union newspaper in Minneapolis, the Northwest Organizer. Trying one last time, Trotsky said, OK, abandon voting for Browder; abandon a manifesto and produce a leaflet making the same political points. But the SWP delegation showed no positive reaction to any of these suggestions.

Trotsky asked a rhetorical question and answered it: "Why this lack of initiative?... It is a photograph of our adaptation to the Rooseveltians." He went over to a direct attack against the SWP's orientation to the "progressives":

"We are in a bloc with so-called progressives—not only fakers, but honest rank and file. Yes, they are honest and progressive but from time to time they vote for Roosevelt—once in four years. This is decisive. You propose a trade union policy, not a Bolshevik policy. Bolshevik policies begin outside the trade unions. You are afraid to become compromised in the eyes of the Rooseveltian trade unionists.... The danger...is adaptation to the pro-Rooseveltian trade unionists. You don't give any answer to the elections, not even the beginning of an answer. But we must have a policy."

Cannon asked at the conclusion of the discussion: "There has not been an approach to the Stalinists in years. Could it be possible?" The light was beginning to dawn, but we know that they didn't make the approach.

There was a lot at stake. Trotsky was trying to get the SWP leadership to see that their orientation to the Rooseveltian "progressives" in the trade unions was determining the politics of the party, and that the pro-progressive policy was paralyzing the party.

So what was going on here? You have to keep in mind that in 1939, the year before, the fight against then-SWP leaders Max Shachtman and Martin Abern had erupted. The resulting split, in which they took out a viable chunk of the youth, was in May, a month before these discussions with Trotsky took place. The Shachtman-Abern minority had lunged to the right particularly after the Hitler-Stalin pact, when defense of the Soviet Union wasn't so popular with petty-bourgeois intellectuals anymore. What Trotsky is fighting about with the majority was that they had some of the same political problems as the minority—they couldn't deal with the Communist Party. Their policy of adapting to the "progressives" in the unions disarmed them in the struggle against the Shachtmanites. If they had pulled off a maneuver like Trotsky was suggesting, it would have had an enormous impact not only on the Stalinist workers, but would have dealt a serious blow to Shachtman's credibility with the more serious youth as well.

If we are doing our job, we always have to look for the contradictions: where we can drive in a wedge to put forth our program positively. We are obligated to develop tactics that are a lever to move as much weight as possible in terms of consciousness, first of the most advanced, then of more backward layers of the working class and oppressed. The Comintern Organizational Resolution talks about layers of workers taking up Communist slogans and carrying them on to others. There are significant examples in our history of just that happening: at our anti-Klan mobilizations when the bus drivers or longshoremen take bundles of our leaflets to hand out, and certainly during the incipient proletarian political revolution in East Germany in 1989-90.

Even if the scale is smaller today and we are at the stage of party building where we are accumulating the cadre to man the necessary party posts for much larger struggles in the future, the program is the same. The injunction to work out effective Leninist tactics, to intervene in every politically charged situation, every social or class struggle, no matter how partial, is the same.