In Honor of Comrade Joe Verret

Founding Member of Spartacist League

1945–2010

Correction Appended

Our comrade Joe Verret died from leukemia in Los Angeles on March 30. He was a founding member of the Spartacist League in 1966 and a respected leading cadre of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). A memorial meeting in his honor was held in Los Angeles on June 12. A salute from the Chicago Local stressed that he would be “missed by those comrades who never even met him but have benefited from his interventions through the years. Joe was of the generation of Southern young white radicals who ‘defied Dixie’ and found their way to revolutionary Marxism.”

A native of New Orleans, Joe was motivated deeply by the need to fight for a third American revolution that would open the road to black freedom in an egalitarian socialist society. In the Deep South under Dixiecrat rule, Joe carried out our work under some of the most difficult circumstances an American communist could face. To this day, the open shop South is a bastion of racist reaction and a sword of Damocles over labor’s struggles.

Joe was at the core of our Southern perspectives for many years but was not the least provincial. His voracious intellectual appetite was renowned. As Bob from Paris wrote, recalling a time when he and Joe were comrades in Britain, whatever Joe read “became the subject of often wide-ranging discussions with other comrades regarding all questions human. The fact he took an interest in so many questions encouraged us to do so too.” Joe played a leading role in establishing the Spartacist League/Britain and made the main political presentation to its 1978 founding conference. Patrick, who worked with Joe in London in the early years, wrote to us of Joe’s “determination and strength of character.” During a scare campaign against the Irish Republican Army, Patrick was fired from his job in London, and Joe was eager to pursue the fight against his victimization. Patrick stated, “He knew racism when he saw it.”

Although Joe left our organization in 2000, he continued to work with comrades through the Prometheus Research Library. He also became, increasingly, a valued mentor for younger comrades of the L.A. Local. As the PRL Librarian observed, Joe was an enormous piece of party history wrapped up in one man. At the memorial, Barry, who worked with Joe for many years, noted that in Joe’s collaborations with Workers Vanguard, he sought to highlight contradictions and changes in social reality. In his last contribution (“Notes on New Orleans,” WV No. 955, 26 March), Joe underlined how the military/police clampdown on New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina exposed the brutal, racist reality behind the facade of bourgeois democracy.

As Joe’s longtime friend and comrade Corky wrote, “Joe left the organization for a time, but we and Joe were able to reconcile and he contributed, in spite of his illness, to WV and gave some internal classes to the organization. So Joe died as both he and we would have it—a Trotskyist.” We reprint below excerpts from the speeches by Gene Herson, Joe’s wife Gloria Verret, and comrades Reuben, Benny and Carla.

Gene Herson: We are here today to remember and honor our comrade Joe Verret, a revolutionary, a founding member of the Spartacist League and a leading cadre of our organization from the day he joined in 1965.

Joe was a fighter—politically as a revolutionary and personally. He fought to the end, enduring multiple bone marrow transplants and a final round of chemo in an effort to see his daughter, Jasmine, graduate from high school this June. His death after a four-year battle with leukemia is a grave loss for our party.

It is difficult to capture the breadth and experience of this comrade. He could be patient and understanding, a good and careful listener, and he could be rock-hard politically and crusty and tenacious—even at times downright cantankerous. He came to be known in the party as the “ole Cajun alligator.”

Joe was born in New Orleans on 11 December 1945. His father came out of Cajun country, picked peppers on the Avery Island plantation and was later a member of the CIO’s Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers union, where he was involved in a 1947 strike where black workers played a leading role. Joe’s dad’s stories about being a union member in the open shop Jim Crow South made a deep impression.

Joe had immense capacity, and diverse interests. He was a communist and talented mathematician. He listened to all kinds of music and loved jazz. He was an enthusiastic cook, creating complicated and exotic dishes. And then there was his wicked sense of humor. Joe and Gloria were always gracious hosts. A teacher by profession, he was an educator in the party. From the time he joined, he helped recruit to the party many of the young people radicalized during the Vietnam War.

This was a time when youth in the U.S. were becoming radicalized in the midst of developments in the civil rights movement, growing opposition to the Vietnam War and the emergence of the New Left. Political organizations were breaking up, like the pro-Mao Progressive Labor Movement, later becoming Progressive Labor Party (PL), which originated in a split from the pro-Soviet Communist Party. And there were the split-offs of the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth group of the reformist, anti-Communist, witchhunting Socialist Party (SP).

Joe was a member of the American Socialist Organizing Committee (ASOC), a left split from the SP. Joe met comrades from the SL at an ASOC conference in Baltimore, I believe, and began corresponding from New Orleans. Joe understood the need to organize a revolutionary party based on the program of Trotskyism. This meant defending the gains of the Bolshevik-led Russian October Revolution. Joe was won over on the necessity to stand for the unconditional defense of deformed workers states like China and Cuba against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution and to fight for a workers political revolution to oust the anti-revolutionary bureaucracy whose policies endanger those gains and undermine revolution internationally. These were crucial lessons which grounded Joe as an effective revolutionary leader.

So during this period Joe rigorously studied these central political questions and became solid on the fundamentals of Marxism and Leninism, including the struggle by Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, presided over by Joseph Stalin with his anti-revolutionary dogma of “socialism in one country.”

In 1965, Joe joined the Spartacists and continued to try to recruit the best ASOC members. At the same time, Joe was writing to the SL national office about the black protests going on in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which organized armed self-defense patrols to protect civil rights workers and black neighborhoods against KKK terror. Joe knew firsthand that the civil rights movement was not just Martin Luther King’s pacifism, as the bourgeois press and many left groups would propagate, so Joe offered to write an article about this which appeared in Spartacist (“Report from New Orleans,” Spartacist No. 8, November-December 1966).

Meanwhile, ASOC was disintegrating, with disputes between various shades of “third campers,” who considered capitalism and Stalinism as twin evils. On 26 April 1966, Joe resigned from ASOC with a statement declaring, “I HAVE JOINED SPARTACIST.” That Labor Day in Chicago, Joe attended the founding conference of the Spartacist League and was elected an alternate member of our Central Committee. Joe went to work as the Spartacist organizer in New Orleans. But it was more like organizing and politically intervening in the entire Gulf region. In one letter to New York, Joe reported, “Arrived yesterday in Houston after four days spent in Austin at the SDS NC [Students for a Democratic Society National Committee] there. I plan to be back in New Orleans on Thursday, leaving there after a day or so for a SSOC [Southern Student Organizing Committee] high school conference in Atlanta, returning to New O. via Tallahassee.”

Joe was well known and respected in the New Orleans left. Our small group was often involved in united-front defense work, including with black militants in the left wing of the Southern civil rights movement. There was one united-front defense protest with SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) in 1968 to protest the cop killing of a black youth, after the NAACP called off a planned march. The protest came on the heels of Martin Luther King’s assassination and a massive police presence was expected. Our comrades contacted Charles Sims of the Deacons for Defense and requested assistance. Joe recalled in a class he gave to comrades here in Los Angeles: “It’s us and SNCC and it’s like hundreds of cops are circling the demonstration.… I don’t think we would have done it without the Deacons; we would have just probably gotten beaten up.”

Joe’s communist work in the South was dangerous. For over two years, beginning in 1966, the New Orleans Spartacist League local was infiltrated by three state agents and informers, who did their best to get “evidence” that the SL was engaged in or advocated violent or illegal activities. But the 1967 Louisiana Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities Report No. 9 on “The Spartacist League and Certain Other Communist Activities in South Louisiana” acknowledged that the agents had never heard anyone in our organization so much as joke about violence. This is a testimony to the scrupulous work conducted under Joe’s leadership. An internal party circular at the time noted, “The report is not a bad recruiting pamphlet for us,” as it shows us to be genuine Marxists committed to socialist revolution and working-class rule.

In August of 1967, the cops arrested three SL members, including a leading black woman comrade, Shirley, who was making a Southern tour, along with a friend. They were arrested under the Louisiana vagrancy law after returning from an all-night drive from Atlanta. The comrades were facing up to six months in jail and hundreds of dollars in fines. The SL mounted a defiant defense campaign, which was ultimately successful. Joe led the comrades in organizing defense efforts in this and other cases.

As the organizer of the branch, Joe was particularly targeted. He was physically attacked by an undercover cop at a campus snack bar, suffering a chipped tooth and broken glasses. Joe told L.A. comrades years later, “I can tell you that when I would get death threats, I would be afraid. I spent weeks checking around the hood of my car to make sure it hadn’t been wired for bombs. But it’s a question of how you manage your fear, and the party’s program is what gives you the ability to manage that.”

During this period, Joe was intervening in an anti-Vietnam War group, one that was supposed to be open to all those who opposed the war. The pro-Mao Stalinist PL was also in this group, but could not defend its politics against the Spartacist League. PL resorted to Stalinist dirty tricks and organizational maneuvers to dodge the SL’s Trotskyist program. When PL pulled a purge effort, Joe countered with a leaflet, “Moscow Trials in New Orleans,” exposing PL. PL succeeded in purging the SL and converted the antiwar group into an organization ironically named the Movement for a Democratic Society, welcoming anarchists and other anti-Marxists.

Joe understood that recruiting to the party meant rigorous education and training. One comrade Joe recruited, who went on to do communist work in the United Auto Workers, recalled Joe training her and a crew of disparate youth. She wrote:

“I don’t know who else could have taken on the training and education of this unpromising and unlikely bunch. I personally had been a member of the I.S. [International Socialists] without ever seeing an I.S. newspaper, without reading a word of Lenin or Marx, never heard of Shachtman, and had no idea that the I.S. put a pox on both houses in the Vietnam War.

“He assigned and laid out an ambitious syllabus of reading for our study group sessions. Soon, he even made us present and lead the discussions. He was an infinitely patient and challenging teacher. He was serious about building a Trotskyist party and managed to make us serious about it too.”

Through all of this, Joe was also carrying out his work as a national leader on the SL Central Committee, keeping an eye on the work of the party and comrades around the country. Joe was elected to the Central Committee as a full member in 1969.

That same year, at the height of the Vietnam War, he was drafted into the Army. Joe followed the SL’s policy laid out in “On Draft Resistance: You Will Go!” (Spartacist No. 11, March-April 1968). Counterposed to the largely student “hell no, we won’t go!” protesters, as Marxists we joined our class brothers and sisters in the military to win them to our class-struggle program. Joe, along with other comrades, like Reuben who is here today, worked on the G.I. Voice newsletter beginning in 1969, urging soldiers to exercise their democratic right to protest against U.S. imperialism’s dirty war. The publication was infused with a class analysis and connected the repression in the military with the oppression and exploitation of the working class and the oppression of blacks.

Joe, a well-known red, was ordered by the Army to keep redoing basic training in Louisiana for a year! He told me a story about how two officers took him on a long drive to a remote part of the base in the bayous. He didn’t know if he was coming back from this. After asking him some questions, they brought him back to his barracks. And he went when they shipped him to Vietnam for a six-month hitch. Just after he got there, his weapon was taken away and he was given a desk job.

Throughout his political life, Joe intervened on a broad range of domestic and international questions in the party. This included playing an important role in the party’s work on the fight for black liberation. In 1974, at the Fourth National Conference of the Spartacist League, he served on the Black Commission. A year earlier, he had written a key document on the Russian question, focusing on guerrilla movements and the formation of the deformed workers states.

Joe was a member of the London Spartacist Group, which was set up in 1976. Joe played a leading role in the founding of the Spartacist League/Britain in 1978, giving the key report on building and transforming the section. Joe also played a prominent role in a 1985 internal party discussion on slogans against apartheid in South Africa.

In 1979, at our First International Conference, Joe was elected a full member of the International Executive Committee, the leading body of the international Spartacist tendency, now International Communist League. In the late ’70s and early ’80s he played a leading role in both our Canadian and British sections, including serving as National Chairman of the Trotskyist League of Canada. Joe’s key fights in that section were “centrally against a narrow circle existence,” as one comrade there recalled, and on the Russian question as Cold War II heated up. He was also a member of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League/Britain.

Joe was also stationed in the Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand for several weeks in 1980 as a representative of the International Secretariat. John, who had been in our Austin branch and collaborated with Joe in the ’60s, was in the Australian section when Joe got there and remembered Joe

“taking apart a leaflet that the Melbourne Local wrote which we had thought was pretty good. The title was ‘Hate Carter, Khomeini, Scabs.’ Joe pointed out that in the United States such a title might not be a bad thing at the time. The problem here was that it was indistinguishable from the position of any good social democrat. I think his trip at that time was the key to the Australians [comrades] beginning to recognize that the main enemy of the Australian working class and oppressed is those who rule Australia.”

After further international work, Joe returned to the U.S. in 1981 and served on the SL/U.S. Political Bureau during his brief stay in our center.

Joe led our former Atlanta Local from 1983 until 1996. In Atlanta, he was part of the leadership of a Partisan Defense Committee-initiated labor/black mobilization to counter a Klan provocation against Martin Luther King Day on 21 January 1989. It was one of the hairiest actions I have been involved in. We brought out more of a crowd than we expected, but were very thin on marshals for maintaining order and security. Afterward, Joe and I had a drink together, just looked at each other and knew it could have gone very differently. Joe always had a hard-nosed sense of social reality in America, a product of being a communist fighter in the South.

In 1996, Joe transferred to Los Angeles, where he spent the rest of his life. Joe resigned from the SL in 2000, and this, I think, was unfortunate. The way this happened was unfortunate. I made it my business to get out to L.A. to say that to him in person before he died and also let him know that many other comrades felt that way. What disturbs me is the manner in which this was handled, even if the outcome would have been the same. But this has to be placed in political perspective. As the main resolution passed by the Thirteenth National Conference of the SL/U.S. stated:

“The period that the SL/U.S. has confronted in the last decades is characterized by a dearth of class struggle and the proletariat’s defeat with the counterrevolution in the USSR, which has resulted in a throwback in consciousness where communism is considered utopian at best. The party’s internal struggles have reflected the impact of this reactionary period on us.”

The Spartacist League is the longest continually existing revolutionary Marxist organization. We are going on 45 years as a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist party dedicated to the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed by abolishing capitalism through worldwide workers revolution. Joe was a key part of this from the beginning.

The Workers Vanguard article on the conference [“Dog Days of the Post-Soviet Period,” WV No. 948, 4 December 2009] made the point that “In the past period we have certainly made errors, which we struggle to understand and correct without demonizing comrades.” The point is to approach political questions based on an objective assessment of the concretes and reality and on a programmatic basis. When I last talked with Joe, this was his disposition.

After he resigned, Joe continued to work with the Prometheus Research Library. Then, as a sympathizer, he became increasingly close to the party again. He contributed to and tried to correct Workers Vanguard articles. He was an especially valued mentor to the Los Angeles comrades. In April 2009, recognizing Joe’s lifelong contributions and commitment to the SL, the Political Bureau voted him an honorary member of the SL/U.S.

Joe’s death is a loss for our small revolutionary party. But we have gained a great deal from his contributions, which we can build on, making our party stronger to help our cause of building a revolutionary workers party as a section of a reforged Fourth International—the cause to which he dedicated his life.

Gloria Verret: I want to thank everybody for the tributes around the country. I’m glad a lot of people got to visit Joe while he was still talking. The L.A. branch has my gratitude because I was working full-time and I have a daughter. And if I ever couldn’t do something, the organizer here and the comrades here did it. Most of all, thank you for bringing him back into the party. Despite the debilitating deterioration of the cancer, it gave him purpose; he was able to write, produce, be a part of the bigger picture that he never left in his heart.

Joe was a very shy man. Only in the party did his true colors come out, where he could be the fierce man he was. This is where he really lived his life. We would still have a lot of fun, we traveled a lot and had a lot of adventures. There are pictures over there of some of our beach trips. He never stuck his toe in the water, hardly, but he loved to be on the edge of it and loved cooking for people. The nurses at work are sad for me and for them because I used to bring all of the leftovers. Joe cooked not for two people; he cooked for 20 people.

He also introduced me to culture because I am from South Dakota and I had none, either. He took me to the opera, the ballet. For 17 of our years we were parents to Jasmine, the light of our lives. He was an awesome dad from the very beginning.

We had some wild adventures. When we got married, there are some pictures of us—I am covered with champagne. He actually spent his wedding night next to [comrade] Kevin, who passed out next to him. Then there was the time in New York where we had our moving crew pack up all of our worldly belongings and we took them out to dinner in gratitude. And the people that stole our truck were also grateful that we packed it up nicely; they drove off to the New Jersey Turnpike. We found it later. There was a time in Chicago when he sat up bolt upright in the middle of the night holding his ear, which had been bloodied by a huge rat. I always thanked him for taking the hit that night.

One of the last things he said the week before he fell and had to go to the hospital was, “We had a good run, didn’t we?” And we did. The last four years were pretty rough. He was a fighter and underwent a lot. He went from about 230 to 150 in weight. He went from a 60-year-old working man who loved teaching and wanted to cook—he looked 90.

Joe never gave up hope that he could get back to his life—working, teaching. The thing I can get some comfort from is that he had written things for WV at the end. He was participating in his mind despite his body being ravaged. Whatever he went through, whenever he was in delirium, I would always say: do you know who I am? And he would say, yes, you are my sweetie. He always remembered me and he would always remember Jasmine and his dog.

Reuben: When I was “released from the control and custody” of the Army in 1969, I volunteered to reinforce our beleaguered New Orleans branch. But when I got there the Army had got Joe. It took 40 years before I had the opportunity to work with him.

Two projects beckoned where I could draw on his rich experience, insight and political depth. One was a party discussion on the importance of mass black incarceration, which culminated in the Black History forum I gave this past February. In and out of the hospital, facing down death, he worked for two months on the material he sent me on the forum. Example: Regarding Douglas Blackmon’s study of black convict labor in Alabama, Slavery by Another Name, Joe wrote:

“The author mentions that in the time that he is talking about, some large percentage of southern blacks lived on the land, that is, they were sharecroppers. And sharecropping was the real backbone of the southern system.… The end of the sharecropper system was a predecessor to the victory of the Civil Rights movement over Jim Crow racism. We should note the population of the U.S. became urban just before WWI, but the black population did not become urban until about 1960!”

It took Joe’s renowned determination and a blood transfusion to make it to that forum, stay afterwards to give me a critique and go out to dine with comrades and contacts.

The next day, when I stopped by his place with comrade Sheri, we talked about the upcoming labor/black history class on the ’30s. As originally conceived, the class was light on the black question. Joe was full of ideas for the class, so I called Don, who was giving it, handed my cell to Joe while his dog Zoey took me out for a spin. When I got back the phone was hot, the battery was dead and the class was the better for it.

At the fresh grave of the Georgian Bolshevik and Left Oppositionist Kote Tsintsadze, Trotsky contrasted to the West the harsh conditions that forged the Bolsheviks of the East—and, one might add, the American Deep South—concluding:

“The revolutionary begins where personal ambition is fully and wholly subordinated to the service of a great idea, voluntarily submitting to and merging with it…. His was the ambition of unshakable revolutionary loyalty. It should serve as a lesson to the proletarian youth.”

Benny: It is going on 37 years since I first met Joe Verret. By 1973 I’d spent three years as a student and anti-Vietnam War activist in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a time of the Black Panther Party and the Chicano Power movement. I spent it learning from the Spartacist League. That year my brother-in-law, Jim, and I ventured on a five-month road trip. Our return route to California was through the South and New Orleans. The New York Spartacist local put us in contact with Joe. What I remember first was Joe taking us to one of his favorite restaurants for gumbo! I remember him smiling and laughing a lot that night. In those few days Joe gave us a thumbnail sketch of New Orleans politics and of jazz music.

Driving through Louisiana and having Joe explain New Orleans was unique. Between the late ’60s and 1973 was a short span of time. But, being young and from the West Coast, one could artificially think that the civil rights movement had resolved social and legal inequalities. What I naively considered “the past” and “history” about the South was looking me in the face: broad swaths of land with blacks in overalls working them. These may not have been the plantations of yesteryear but it wasn’t “the past” looking me in the eye—it was the legacy of Jim Crow! The entire experience gave me clarity of political outlook as to what Joe and the Spartacist League were fighting for—what in revolutionary politics is known as the black question, the question of social revolution.

Joe and I found ourselves in Los Angeles in the fall of 1975. We all came to indulge in following jazz music together. The young black comrades introduced us to the great jazz pianist Horace Tapscott. After maybe two years, Joe left L.A. and returned again in the mid ’90s. Again, Joe made important contributions as part of local discussion on the changing demographics in L.A. with the growth of the Latino and Asian populations. Joe wrote: “L.A. is a really weird place relative to the rest of the U.S. The ghettoization of blacks is more intense than any other big city I know. In every sphere of social/political life the black question is buried.”

The ruling class in America faced in Joseph Verret an ardent enemy of class exploitation, with the intellect and ability to assist in putting the bourgeoisie out of business.

Carla: Joe was my comrade who was able to educate me as a Marxist in Atlanta and shaped the first ten years of my political life as a communist. In Atlanta, we fought the lingering weight of the Martin Luther King legacy in the civil rights struggle and the emerging “talented tenth” toadies that became the black elected officialdom in the wake of the civil rights movement’s defeat. We fought to recruit the best elements from historically black institutions, and elite institutions like Emory, with marginal success. We were the main axis of party intervention from Mississippi to Tennessee and Florida to North Carolina, and we generated propaganda and reportage drawing from our work from the Savannah longshore docks to the coal mines of Alabama. Joe was uniquely capable of guiding such a broad scope of work.

Three years after leaving Atlanta, the lessons learned there came in handy in establishing a station of Spartacist comrades in Johannesburg, South Africa, where neo-apartheid capitalism has entrenched the African National Congress nationalist regime, with South African Communist Party (SACP) Stalinists as their bloc partners. It was Joe who had already given me a primer on the origins of the SACP, the dynamics of the struggle for national liberation in South Africa, as well as in India.

I have not forgotten the demanding effort of maintaining a local collective at great distance from other locals and the comradeship we shared, through internal fights and struggles. We cooked together; we held barbecues and shared books and music and laughed quite often.

We succeeded in organizing a 3,500-strong demonstration in less than two weeks with limited forces against Ku Klux Klan lynch rope terror in downtown Atlanta, when they threatened the MLK holiday in 1989. We were able to do this because we had each learned the power of black and red, our program for mobilizing the multiracial working class in defense of blacks and all the oppressed as a cornerstone of the struggle for socialist revolution. It affirmed for many comrades that even under difficult conditions, with a clear program and a dedicated cadre, we will make inroads into the working class and lead numbers far greater than ourselves. Joe was a good teacher.

Correction

In the article “In Honor of Comrade Joe Verret” (WV No. 962, 30 July), we incorrectly attributed to comrade Verret authorship of the Spartacist League leaflet “Moscow Trials in New Orleans.” It was in fact written by another comrade. (From WV No. 963, 27 August 2010.)