What We Mean by Regroupment, 1957

Regroupment is a process

to form the Communist Party. So when we talk about regroupment, it is not, as superficial people might say, a diplomatic formula, that all we want is a cover in order to get a hold of two or three recruits here or there and grab them and run with them. No, that isn't our idea. Our idea is a real regroupment of many people in the party, the name and form of which we will leave for future determination.

Now, I said this convention had to consider the question of whether we have finished our campaign on recruitment or only decided to really begin it. And the decision has been made that it's really going to begin now and be carried out in full scale: a full-scale campaign for the regroupment of all the revolutionary forces in this country, from whatever organization they may be in at present or where they may develop in the next period, into one single party.

Regroupment is a process. It doesn't simply mean a few organizations or a few individuals getting together and making a formal agreement. That's not possible now. It's a process which includes a struggle of tendencies. Because as we see it, the party we're aiming to create out of this process is not going to be a hodgepodge, but a party with a program. And that will take time. It includes a struggle of tendencies, and on the road to unification, it includes splits. And I'm sorry, or glad, whichever way you want to take me, to say that one of the casualties of this inexorable process of regrouping the revolutionary forces, apparently, is going to be a split in the Shachtmanite Youth Organization. Not because we asked for it, no, but because they insist on it. They're forcing it.

I know that the left wing of the Shachtmanite organization insists, with good faith, we want unity of the YSL. We want unity, and we mean it, but we don't want you to deprive us of our democratic rights to denounce your... All right, I got it. That's what comes from getting two fields, you know? And it appears that the right wing of the Shachtmanite Youth Organization is going to force things to a split. And that will not be a calamity if it happens, although, as I say, neither we advocate it nor do they, nor do the left wing of the Shachtmanite organization, because it will only be a split on one side of the question. The other side will be a unification with the youth supporting the Socialist Workers Party.

And nowhere and never in the history of the workers' movement since the time of Marx and Engels has the development of the revolutionary political party taken place in any other way except by unifications and splits. And it's absolutely ridiculous to have a sentimental attitude on one side or the other. Both, as Trotsky once said, are parts of the process of building the revolutionary party. As part of the regroupment process we include a struggle of tendencies, as I said, against Stalinists. Every time we deal another blow of polemics in our paper against the heads of the Communist Party, we're dealing a blow for the unity of the revolutionary workers, and similarly with the Shachtmanites, the Social Democrats, the labor fakers, and the others.

The year since the 20th Congress

Now I think we are justified in saying, on the basis of our survey of the situation, in which we try to see things as they are and not as we would like them to be, that the first result of the year's discussion and controversy that has followed the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party has been a shift in relations within the general radical movement in favor of the tendency we represent, in favor of the SWP. And it's taken place in two ways. One, by an enormous weakening of the Communist Party, which is the crookedest and most treacherous party this country has ever known, and every weakening that it suffers is a gain for the revolutionary labor movement and for the future of socialism in this country.

But we didn't gain only negatively, we gained positively, as you've heard in the reports here. We have recruited friends and sympathizers whom we've not asked to join the SWP and leave the Communist Party, but whom we have urged to struggle within the CP for a Leninist program and prepare a broader basis of elements for future regroupment with us.

The Social Democrats, as such, I can't say much about. Not only because I don't know much about them, but because nobody else does. And the reason nobody knows much about this SP-SDF is that a diligent search of the country from coast to coast has not uncovered any real trace of their actual existence. And I have begun to believe that it's a figment of Shachtman's [?] imagination. There is no such thing, except possibly in some back room somewhere where some antediluvian social democrats sit wondering and waiting when the New York Daily Forward is going to forgive them for their sin and take them back into the real social democratic fold. So they don't count.

Shachtmanites counted a little bit, but they're trying their very best to obliterate that. I have never seen a politician in all my life drive harder, more frantically, and with greater wit, with more [inaudible], to hasten his own oblivion. Shachtman has got his people all worked up in a lather about joining this mythical SP-SDF before he got permission from the SP-SDF to enter. And just the other day, they had a meeting of the National Executive Committee of the so-called SP-SDF or whatever it is, and while they passed one motion ordering their own so-called left wing to quit the Forum for Free Speech [?] or stand expelled, they passed another motion forbidding any of their members to have any kind of joint political actions with the Shachtmanite organization.

Not only did they fail to vote to admit them into the sacred portals of the dying social democracy, they refused even to have anything to do with them. And Shachtman, in the meantime, has got his people all worked up into a sweat of eager enthusiasm to jump into a door that isn't open. And I thought, in talking to some comrades, there has been created a new personification of a type of politics. There is the politics of Marx, principled politics. There is the politics of Bernstein, opportunist politics. There is the politics of maneuverism, that's the Zinovian politics. And then there's the politics of the blind alley of Shachtman. That's where they are, so we let them rest.

The unification of deserters

Now, one minor subsection of a subdivision of the radical movement consists of people who belong neither to the Socialist Party nor the Communist Party, nor the SWP, nor the Shachtmanites, nor the SLP, nor nothing. And they publish written [?] magazines and tell the world what to do. And they have proclaimed the remarkable theory that the way to build socialism in this country is to begin with all those people, not, as we are, with people who are active in various organizations and thereby testifying to their seriousness, but to recruit everybody who has quit any organization that exists. A unification of deserters, they say, will build an army to march and storm the ramparts of American capital. I never heard that happen before. I don't think quitters can lead anything.

And as a matter of practical fact, I observed it in the past. Under the impact of the Palmer raids and the war persecutions following 1917, when thousands of Communists and Socialist Party members and IWWs were up against the gun, were imprisoned, were being deported, and were standing at their posts, a half or two-thirds of the Socialist Party just simply disappeared. And after we came out of that ordeal and by 1923 had reestablished the legal Communist Party and begun to wonder where we were going to get our recruits from to build new forces, we all had the illusion, well, out of that 60,000, my goodness, maybe we ought to recruit 30,000 of them back. I was a particular advocate of that idea, and I wrote enthusiastic articles about it, not in the Daily Worker but in the weekly Worker that preceded it, and said we had to go after them. We all had the illusion. We put on a campaign, scouring the highways and beating the bushes to bring back into force those who had deserted. Now of course not even we in our young folly ever thought they were going to come in to lead the movement. We thought they might come in at least and join and pay their dues and throw a dollar in the hat.

What we got out of those who had deserted was negligible. The people who built the young Communist Party were first those who had remained and stood by the organization, and then the new recruits who, as always, were mostly the young, the undefeated, the untired, the undisillusioned. And that's what's going to happen in the future, too. And we haven't the slightest reason to take seriously that so-called half-tendency of no organization, no banner, no program, nothing but a magazine. I don't think we have to fear them as a serious ideological opponent.

Now our policy is to build a party. We make no secret about it. When we say regroupment, we don't mean to gather everybody together in a jubilee picnic. We gather them together in a party, that's what we say. But we say at the same time it does not necessarily have to be the SWP. And that's not a diplomatic formula. We have no fetish of name of organization. As Comrade Dobbs in his report pointed out, twice before in our history we've given up the name we were operating under, made a fusion with the American Workers Party and formed a new party. Again, later, when things opened up on a different front and the left wing showed up in the Socialist Party, we disbanded our party and went in and joined it in order to establish contact with the left wing of the SP, and together with them, a year or so later, we formed the present Socialist Workers Party. We say we have no fetishism whatever, and we're deceiving nobody.

But we also say no liquidationism. Nobody's going to get us to disband our party waiting for somebody else to create a party later on that we may join under the leadership of somebody who has not yet made his appearance or who has not been discovered like Moses in the bulrushes. Not us. We want to know where we're going and with whom. And, by the way, when it comes to getting together with certain people with pretensions to leadership, we're certainly willing to say we'll share leadership or we'll even surrender leadership to superior forces and powers and capacities. But all we want to know is, who is it? Where have you been? What are your credentials? And if all you've got to show is a withdrawal ticket from some organization or other, we say that's not good enough. But I'm afraid that's all we're going to find from these pretensions.

We're for fusion. But I don't think that's any reason why people should demand that in the course of the fusion, if somebody knocks on our door three times and says, let me in, we should refuse him and tell him, stand on the doorstep until we've met enough people to form a new party for you. No. We are recruiting as we go along, and the funny part of it is, while we've been advocating fusion and regroupment in good faith, we've recruited more people than for a long, long time. And that's a great source of satisfaction to us, too: recruiting many activists, many sincere and devoted people who are finding in our party the best expression for their socialist aspirations. And the year's result has been one of expanded influence as well as membership and recruitment.

The next stage and workers' democracy

Now the next stage. Could I have a little water? I'm just beginning to get warmed up here. I didn't mean by that that I'm getting ready to go on an extended speech. Just a few more remarks and I'll be done.

The next stage, what do we do? Well, as we've discussed it in the National Committee, we're going to sharpen our critical and polemical line as our contribution to recruitment, mind you, not as a means of splitting things up, but to sharpen our critical and polemical line in order to make the program clearer. We're going to begin to dig in now in the next period into the Daily Worker, the developments in the CP, the capitulation of the Gatesites, the manifest slipping of the Communist Party back into the monolithic mold of Stalinism, and begin a drum fire of criticism that will take loose a great many more workers from Communist Party allegiance.

But criticism and polemics is not the only thing. Supplementing that is our positive program of workers' democracy. That is the second big contribution of our convention, that it has endorsed the program outlined in Comrade Dobbs' report, that we shall develop an extensive propaganda and agitation for a workers' democracy and aim it against not only the Stalinists, but also the social democrats, the labor fakers, and the ruling class of this country. And counterpose to every one of them the real program of workers' democracy to their false and hypocritical and deceptive definition of democracy. The positive program of workers' democracy with us begins in the party itself. Workers' democracy, as we are going to lay it down, in the party, in the trade union organizations, in the state that will be established under the workers' rule. Democracy is a very easy word to say and a very hard thing to implement. And it's very easy to give formal democracy and to suppress it in practice.

You haven't seen any trace of that here. At this convention, I believe we can all take satisfaction that not only have we had the form of democracy in our extended three-day discussions, but we've had the very essence of it. Now all leaders, especially all bureaucrats, know, all the social democrats and all the [inaudible] know, that you can grant formal democratic rights to the delegates in the convention, as to the members of a branch. And yet at the same time, as a rank-and-file delegate gets up and makes a criticism, you can hurl at him the ridicule and the slander and the innuendos of the top brass and make a monkey out of him and make him afraid to raise his voice a second time. That's the way they do it.

Here I would say that in this convention, if there had been a single violation of the formalities of correct socialist deportment in debate, not one of them came from the leaders of the party. Not a single one who spoke in this convention was given any reason to feel whatever that he would be ridiculed or denounced or misrepresented or slandered. And that, I say, is a great pride to us, and the way this convention has been conducted should be the model for the party life all the way down through all the branches every time. And it should be taken as an example to the local leaders as to how they shall deal in their own affairs with the rank-and-file members of the party who might get up without sufficient experience in speaking on the floor, might make some criticisms which are unwelcome and which could easily be refuted and twisted and ridiculed until there's nothing left of the poor devil who ventured to open his mouth. That can be done, but I think the example here is that, contrary to that, the leaders of our local organizations everywhere will create such an atmosphere of free and unhampered democracy that every rank-and-file member will feel that's his own party, where he can express himself freely without any fear whatsoever.

That isn't the way they do it in other parties. Let me talk to some of these left-wing youth how they get treated in the Shachtmanite organization. When they stand up and say they're opposed to liquidating their organization into the Social Democratic Federation, and they want to maintain it as a revolutionary independent youth organization, do they get a logical and friendly and comradely answer? No. They get ridiculed. They get denunciations. They get called splitters. They get slandered. You're nothing but a bunch of Cannonite agents. They get all kinds of accusations hurled against them to prevent them getting a hearing for their political position. And then the Shachtmanites say, all this comes under the head of democracy, social democratic model, and in that they're absolutely correct. That's what it is. Democracy on the social democratic model.

Workers' democracy in the unions

Now how do they do things in the trade unions? These trade union fakers who make a great profession in public of being against the Soviet Union for one particular reason: it's not democratic. And their slogan all the way from Beck to Reuther is democracy versus dictatorship. But in the essence of the matter, there is not one percent of democracy in the trade union movement of the United States, as you know. And that's one reason why the slogan of workers' democracy has got to be carried into the trade unions and made the spearhead of a campaign to overthrow them.

In Beck's union, of course, they don't make any pretense. [inaudible] What did this guy do? Open his mouth? A couple of goons take care of him. A local out in Oakland, California, has gone around getting radical, making better contracts with the bosses than we want them to do. Put them under receivership. Do you know that a third in the Teamsters Union don't even have the right to elect their own local officials? They're under receivership, and the officials are appointed by the national officers, and all the rank and file has got to do, you might say, is come to meetings and keep their mouth shut. No, they haven't got that right. No meetings at all until the receiverships exist. That's the kind of democracy that Beck [inaudible].

Now, from Beck to Reuther, there's quite a way, but there's a tie between them. They're both bureaucrats. They're both servants in the labor movement of the interests of American imperialism. But Reuther makes a great show of formal democracy. He's a former social democrat himself, and they have conventions and you have a right to speak at the conventions. But what happened at the last convention of the UAW? The brass sat on the platform, behind them all the millions of dollars in the treasury and all the support of the bosses against the rank and file, and behind that the support of the government if necessary. And some comrade got up to protest against the speed-up. A woman. Got up to protest against the speed-up and to demand that the officials do more, hobnob less with the employers, and do more to encourage rank-and-file action to stop the murderous speed-up. A girl from Local 3, the Dodge Local. And what did they do with it? With all that mass power of the bureaucracy on the platform, Reuther takes the floor for a blast to denounce by name this girl who had stood up and spoken so respectfully, and whipped up a lynch spirit so as to make any other delegate afraid to open his mouth.

And we ought to consider it as a symbol of the beginning of the struggle for workers' democracy in this country. A symbol and a prophecy of what's to come: that the girl who stood up and challenged that bureaucratic machine at the UAW convention was our girl, Edie Fox. I say that was a symbol and a prophecy. And the time will come when there will be tens and hundreds and thousands of them, and out of their efforts and out of the help that the party will give them and direction, we will change things.

You can't overthrow capitalist society in the United States until you first knock out its principal prop. And the principal prop of capitalism in this country is this trade union bureaucracy. And when they say to us, democracy in the Soviet Union, that's our demand, we say yes. We want democracy, but we want democracy all the way from Moscow to Detroit, and it's in Detroit that we're going to enforce it, because that's where the danger to us lies. And out of the fight to overthrow this bureaucracy, with the powerful slogan of workers' democracy, which will be the battering ram of our fight in the coming days, the overthrow of capitalism will be an easy thing after that, because the capitalist class itself is very small and very weak, and without its labor [?] it'll never be able to stand very long. It will not long survive after we win the battle of workers' democracy in the trade unions.

The magnitude of the task

And we will not settle merely for that. We'll not settle merely for better conditions or for more wages or more welfare. We, the members of the Socialist Workers Party and the thousands and the millions that will come with us later, will settle for nothing less than socialism. That's the goal and the vision of the party that's represented in this hall in this historic convention. This is the vision that gave us strength in adversity and gives us inspiration and strength again now in a new period of expanding opportunity.

In one of the greatest books ever written, Jack London's The Iron Heel, he describes the terrible things that happened in the future that he had envisioned, and the revolution had been defeated at a stage, and the hero of the novel, who apparently had been killed just before he hid his manuscript. The great novel ends with an uncompleted sentence. It reads as follows: "The magnitude of the task..." three dots. And there it is. I say it is for us to take that and recognize there is the magnitude of the task. We must not deceive ourselves about it. But let us complete the sentence of the hero of Jack London's novel and say: the magnitude of the task and the grandeur of the vision.