By George Breitman
On April 8, 1983, a membership meeting of the Bay Area District of the
Socialist Workers Party (from branches in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose)
was held in San Jose to hear a report on the latest three in a series of
expulsions being engineered by the SWP “central leadership team” headed by
Jack Barnes. During the discussion period, Asher Harer, a veteran party member
from San Francisco, made some comments about the newly-announced
“organizational norm” prohibiting SWP members from communicating with
members of other branches under pain of expulsion. Harer said that if James P.
Cannon, the principal founder of the SWP, were alive today, he could not exist
in the SWP. Cannon often communicated directly with members in other branches,
on all sorts of questions, and Harer said he had a file of Cannon letters to
prove it.
Harer was answered by Clifton DeBerry, a member of the national Control
Commission, a former member of the National Committee, and a former presidential
candidate, who said: “If James P. Cannon wrote such letters today, he would be
expelled.” DeBerry added that the SWP is a “more disciplined” party today
than in Cannon’s time. Some NC members who supported the new norms were also
present, but none differentiated themselves from what DeBerry had said.
DeBerry’s remarks were not repeated in written form, then or later, but
they were very revealing. For more than a year the SWP leadership had been
accusing oppositionists in the NC of violating the party’s organizational
principles (“norms”), which the leadership allegedly was trying to maintain
and defend. And now DeBerry had blurted out the truth: Even the founder of the
party would have been ousted as “undisciplined” if he had lived to 1983 and
tried to function in accord with the organizational norms that prevailed in the
party from its founding in 1938 to his death in 1974. Since these norms had
never been changed in Cannon’s time, or later, they were being violated all
right—not by the oppositionists but by the leadership itself, which was
reinterpreting them and giving them a new content without ever formally
discussing or formally changing them.
In the following year the SWP leadership expelled all known or suspected
oppositionists, dissidents, or critics. The real reason they were expelled was
that they had political differences with or doubts about the leadership’s new
orientation toward Castroism and away from Trotskyism, and that the leadership
was afraid to debate this orientation with them in front of the SWP membership.
The ostensible reason given by the leadership was that the expelled members had
in various ways violated the party’s traditional organizational principles,
especially the 1965 resolution on “The Organizational Character of the
Socialist Workers Party.”
The present pamphlet consists of three letters and the text of a talk by
Cannon in 1966 and 1967, which prove conclusively that Cannon did not share the
current SWP leadership’s interpretation of the 1965 resolution. The real
tradition of the SWP on democratic centralism is different than the present
leadership makes it out to be. Like Trotsky, Cannon is a witness against the
revisionist political and organizational policies of the Barnes group.
Cannon was 75 years old and living in Los Angeles in 1965. He was national
chairman of the party but no longer responsible for its day-to-day activity,
which was handled by the Political Committee and national secretary Farrell
Dobbs from the party center in New York. When the PC decided to submit a
resolution on organizational principles to the 1965 convention, it chose a
committee of Dobbs, George Novack, and Cannon to prepare a draft. Dobbs wrote it
and Novack edited it. A copy was sent to Cannon, who sent it back without
comment. He thought the draft was poorly written and too ambiguous on certain
key points, but did not undertake to amend or redraft it. He did not attend the
1965 convention, which adopted the resolution by a vote of 51 to 8.
In 1968 Cannon discontinued direct correspondence with the party center in
New York. But before that happened, he wrote and said some things in 1966 and
1967 which showed that he disagreed with PC members who were interpreting the
1965 resolution as a signal to “tighten” or “centralize” the party,
which he believed could only damage it, perhaps fatally.
1. DON’T TRY TO ENFORCE A NONEXISTENT LAW
Cannon’s letter of February 8, 1966, had the following background: Arne
Swabeck, a party founder and NC member, had been trying for seven years to
convert the SWP from Trotskyism to Maoism. Despite repeated efforts before and
during SWP national conventions in 1959, 1961, 1963, and 1965, his small group
made little headway among the members. lncreasingly he and his group began to
ignore the normal channels for discussion in the party, and to communicate their
ideas to selected members by mail. This led to demands by Larry Trainor, an NC
member in Boston, for disciplinary action against Swabeck and his ally in the NC,
Richard Fraser. Through a circular letter for the PC Tom Kerry announced that
the matter would be taken up at a plenum of the NC to be held at the end of
February.
Cannon’s letter was addressed to the supporters of the NC majority tendency
(which excluded the supporters of the Swabeck and Fraser-Clara Kaye tendencies,
etc.). Cannon tried to convince the majority that political discussion and
education were the answer to the minority tendencies, not disciplinary action.
“There is absolutely no party law or precedent for such action,” he said,
“and we will run into all kinds of trouble in the party ranks, and the
International, if we try this kind of experiment for the first time…It would
be too bad if the SWP suddenly decided to get tougher than the Communist Party
[of the 1920s] and try to enforce a nonexistent law—which can’t be enforced
without creating all kinds of discontent and disruption.” (Emphasis added)
This was written five months after the adoption of the 1965 resolution. It
demonstrates that Cannon saw nothing in that resolution that could be cited as
“party law or precedent” for the kind of disciplinary action taken by the
Barnes leadership in the 1980s.
The February 1966 meeting of the NC found Cannon’s arguments convincing.
They did not want to conduct, for “the first time” in the party’s history,
the experiment of trying to enforce “a nonexistent law.” So the whole
question was dropped—until after Cannon’s death.
2. REASONS FOR THE SURVIVAL OF THE SWP AND FOR ITS NEW VITALITY IN THE
1960s
Cannon’s September 6, 1966, talk was one of “my last speeches before I
fell into retirement, so to speak,” he said shortly before his death. It was
given to a Labor Day weekend educational conference at a camp near San
Francisco, and it was obviously intended primarily for members of the SWP and
YSA, rather than for the general public. The form of this talk was that of a
discussion about the history of the SWP and the FI, which Cannon used to express
his thinking about the problems facing the SWP in 1966, its strengths and
weaknesses, the pressures it was feeling, and the lessons from the past that it
could learn for the present and the future. Although the talk was couched mainly
in historical terms, experienced listeners understood that Cannon was saying,
“I think we have some serious problems now and we’d better think about how
to handle them.” The SWP leadership never printed this talk (which was
transcribed from a taped recording and edited by Evelyn Sell 18 years later,
after her expulsion from the SWP as an oppositionist, and was printed in the
Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, No 14, December 1984).
Cannon’s main concern here was that some SWP and YSA leaders were not
sufficiently resisting and opposing the harmful influences of the “New Left”
to which they were subjected in the antiwar and student movements. Some
“younger comrades”, he said quite openly, gave him the impression that they
had not fully assimilated the cardinal principle of internationalism. His stress
on the SWP as “revolutionary continuators” was directed not only against the
New Left but against those in the SWP and YSA who disregarded this factor or
thought it insignificant. His demand for polemics with opponent tendencies
(“the mark of a revolutionary party”) stemmed from his conviction that there
was a reluctance among SWP and YSA leaders to openly explain their differences
with the New Left. Similarly with most of the talk—it was not just a criticism
of the New Left but of party and YSA members who he thought were defaulting on
the theoretical and educational struggle against New Leftism.
But Cannon did not fail also to raise the questions about party democracy
that had been on his mind during the previous two or more years. He began by
touching on the “flexible democracy” that had enabled the party to survive
historically: “We never tried to settle differences of opinion by suppression.
Free discussion—not every day in the week but at stated regular times, with
full guarantees for the minority—is a necessary condition for the health and
strength of an organization such as ours.” It never occurred to him to add
that any of this had been superseded by the 1965 resolution.
Continuing, he noted that factionalism can get out of hand or become
unprincipled. “But on the other hand,” he said, “if a party can live year
after year without any factional disturbances, it may not be a sign of
health—it may be a sign that the party’s asleep; that it’s not a real live
party. In a live party you have differences, differences of appraisal, and so
on. But that’s a sign of life.” The present SWP leaders hardly ever say
things like that any more; and even when they do, they mean something different
than Cannon meant.
3. A TREND IN THE WRONG DIRECTION
In 1966 some SWP members raised the question of codifying parts of the 1965
resolution through amendments to the party’s constitution at the next national
convention. A PC-appointed constitution committee (Reba Hansen, Harry Ring, Jean
Simon [Tussey]) began, in consultation with national organization secretary Ed
Shaw, to consider proposed changes for the constitution, including one to alter
the way the national Control Commission was elected and functioned.
In his response (reprinted from Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, No 8, June
1984) Cannon was quite disturbed by this proposal, especially because he saw it
as part of a dangerous trend: “As far as I can see all the new moves and
proposals to monkey with the Constitution which has served the party so well in
the past, with the aim of ‘tightening’ centralization, represent a trend in
the wrong direction at the present time. The party (and the YSA) is too
‘tight’ already, and if we go much further along this line we can run the
risk of strangling the party to death.”
Most of Cannon’s letter was an explanation of why the party would be better
off if the Control Commission remained an “independent” or “separate”
body elected by the national convention as a whole than it would be as a mere
subcommittee of the NC. But he also seized the opportunity to assert the
necessity to “practice what we preach” about existing constitutional
provisions “to protect every party member against possible abuse of authority
by the National Committee.” There was nothing ambiguous about his position:
“In the present political climate and with the present changing composition
of the party, democratic centralism must be applied flexibly. At least ninety
percent of the emphasis should be placed on the democratic side and not on any
crackpot schemes to ‘streamline’ the party to the point where questions are
unwelcomed and criticism and discussion stifled. That is a prescription to kill
the party…”
Cannon clearly did not feel that the 1965 resolution justified or authorized
the kind of undemocratic changes that the “centralizing” Barnes leadership
made in the name of the 1965 document in the 1970s and 1980s. Cannon’s letter
was effective—none of the proposals he warned against were recommended by the
constitution committee or adopted at the 1967 convention.
4. THE SWP’S GREAT TRADITION
The Arne Swabeck case came up again in 1967, when both an SWP national
convention and an FI world congress were scheduled. By then Swabeck had lost all
hope in the SWP and the FI. Instead of trying once more to convince their
members, he publicly attacked the SWP’s policies in a letter to a hostile
political group in England (the Healyites). For this deliberate violation of
discipline, the PC asked the NC to suspend him from membership pending the
coming convention.
Cannon had no sympathy whatever for Swabeck’s politics or organizational
practices, but he felt it would be “awkward” to begin the preconvention and
preworld congress discussions by suspending the one articulate critic of the
party’s positions and actions. He therefore urged that Swabeck’s
provocations be handled by publishing Swabeck’s letters together with a
comprehensive political answer to them. This “subordination of disciplinary
measures to the bigger aims of political education”—which he called a
continuation of the party’s great tradition—had always served the party well
in the past, he argued, and in the Swabeck case would “better serve the
education of the new generation of the party and the consolidation of party
opinion” than would the proposed suspension.
Most members of the NC disagreed with Cannon. They felt Swabeck’s violation
of discipline was too flagrant to be ignored, and they felt that he already had
been answered politically over and over again, so that disciplinary action in
this case would not represent any rupture with the SWP’s great tradition. The
NC suspended Swabeck, who continued to attack the SWP publicly, and soon after
he was expelled. The differences in this case between the NC majority and Cannon
were tactical, and it is possible to see the logic and merits in both their
positions. But perhaps Cannon was looking a little farther ahead than most of
the NC members.
Swabeck had so discredited himself, Cannon told the PC, that the immediate
effect of the party’s reaction to the new provocation would not be very great
whether he was suspended or not. “But the long range effect on the political
education of the party, and its preparation to cope with old problems in new
forms, can be very great indeed.” It is clear from this that Cannon was
concerned with something bigger than the fate of Swabeck; that he was trying to
alert the party to dangers that transcended the issue of whether or not to
suspend Swabeck prior to the convention; that he feared mistakes on this issue
could have damaging long range effects on the party, its political education,
and its ability to fulfill its revolutionary mission.
The Swabeck case was soon forgotten, but the dangers that worried Cannon are
worth recalling today, after the SWP leadership, in a brutal break with the
party’s tradition of subordinating disciplinary measures to political
discussion and clarification, expelled and in other ways drove out any and all
members who were suspected of having oppositional views (whether they were
articulate or not). The SWP leadership “justified” this purge by accusing
the expellees of being disrupters and splitters who, “like Swabeck,” were
outside the party only because of their own indiscipline and disloyalty. But
everybody in the SWP knows that most of the expellees fought to remain in the
party, unlike Swabeck, and are still fighting to be reinstated, also unlike
Swabeck. Most members of the FI know this, too, because at their world congress
in February 1985, they voted overwhelmingly to demand the reinstatement of the
purged members. The fight for the SWP’s tradition continues, but the SWP
leadership is fighting on the other side.
