Presentations to SL Bay Area District Conference

Robertson: There’s an I.S. meeting and a Political Bureau meeting going on as we speak. Stamberg has just voted for Socorro’s expulsion. I always thought there was a little moral fiber to that Stamberg.

Now, if you want to feel sorry for somebody, feel sorry for Norden. He spent a number of decades, going over from some kind of quasi-syndicalist position, struggling to expound revolutionary Marxism in the four corners of the world, and he’s now been brought down and is drifting off into some version of centrism with a nominal acknowledgement of the aim of Workers Power and with attraction to the various kinds of centrist combinations that Workers Power is a pretty good example of—that doesn’t mean that he’s going to end up there. I wish him well. I hope he gets a job with Fidel Castro, paid in foreign currency and that the regime lasts a long time, although I doubt that—that was one of our differences. Well, you should feel sorry for him. He spent the best decades of his life working 16 hours a day for the Marxist, socialist movement and now he spins out in this fashion.

There reputedly has been sympathy for the plight of Socorro, sympathy expressed in the Bay Area and that’s why we have this kind of district meeting, and that therefore the people who expelled her, among whom I certainly want to be counted, and not the least, are being called here to account. Now, Socorro did some bad stuff in Mexico. I, for one—and I have to give a bit of personal testimony—wasn’t sure what transpired on the May Day in which Negrete, who was supposed to be on leave arranging his affairs to leave the city and the country, turned up in this large and evidently quite dangerous May Day demonstration. But there was a trial with quite a competent trial body and painstaking collection of affidavits from numerous Mexican comrades. And in fact, Socorro, who was supposed to be the photographer for our activity in this tens of thousands of people May Day, detached herself from our demo and spent her time with Negrete and lied about it, lied about everything, lied about getting him there, said that she forgot her film, she forgot her lenses, she had to have Negrete there to bring the stuff and stay with her, failed to make contact. She also did something else that was damn dangerous: Negrete is the most well-known of our people in Mexico City, and if somebody was going to physically attack one of our people, it was going to be Negrete, and incidentally Socorro—in order that Negrete could participate in this demo, which he had no known interest in, except to express his resentment of the new leadership. This was really a very serious matter of breach of security and a whole bunch of lies. So, I wasn’t sure about this. But the trial body was quite good and the affidavits were quite good and Socorro had indeed lied like a trooper and endangered this, that and the other thing, including herself.

Socorro had only been reduced to candidacy for a few months, but she took it very badly and among her remarks were the ones that are on the wall behind. Normally what is written up there is part of a “fuck you, I quit.” Well, she said “fuck you,” but she couldn’t quit because the “group” that she was in, not a very large group, but Norden and Stamberg and Negrete and herself, didn’t want to quit then. So she said “fuck you” and didn’t quit. So she got expelled.

Now why should there be echoes of concern in the Bay Area over this? If anybody in the room wants to say “this is a no-good party, I quit,” you’re welcome to do it. But obviously, since you’re here, that’s not the reason. You’re not members of a secret faction boring from within. Evidently some people feel either that the organization is lying through its teeth and committed a frame-up, or that maybe some of your activities, some of your feelings, some of your moods, are in contradiction to what can be, under some circumstances, a combat party that does seriously demand not merely an exercise of discipline but a lot of energy and possibly some risk. So either the party really is bureaucratic, or the claims of a combat party are something that some comrades are uneasy about, or both.

I can understand Socorro’s anger. Right now, we hear from Negrete, who hasn’t told a true word lately, that she’s demoralized and emotional and hysterical and withdrawn. The only empirical evidence that we have is that she’s mentally very healthy, i.e., extremely angry. She made a phone call to Paula in Chicago in which she expressed her keen hostility and anger and otherwise showed herself to be in a prime mental state. But she ought to be very angry because Negrete got her into this business in Mexico City by having her tell a bunch of lies and do what he wanted, and then after she got thrown out, Norden and Stamberg voted for her expulsion and she’s a member of their group. She ought to be plenty angry. But what does this have to do with any faint hearts in the Bay Area, pray tell? Unless you feel the sinister hand of bureaucracy searching you out or that maybe you can’t cut the mustard and that somebody’s going to find it out.

What else is there to say for my part? Not bloody very much. Since there’s a PB and an I.S. meeting going on right now and we’re three hours ahead of them or behind them, depending on how you do it, we asked that they fax us little hourly summaries. There’s a note here—besides mentioning that Stamberg voted for Socorro’s expulsion—that “By the way, Bay Area comrades should know that the New York local wants to write the BA locals a round-robin letter explaining what they think about ‘the group’ in case anyone out there thinks there’s a shred of sympathy here. There isn’t.” Which is kind of a problem. Socorro got expelled for what she did, not because it is believed, falsely, that Norden likes her.

Kendall: Well, Socorro’s remarks were basically a statement that there was no line between the party and the bourgeois state, and a declaration of her rejection of the party’s discipline which she’d already rejected in action at the May Day rally in Mexico City. It is a statement which puts her outside the principles upon which this party is founded. Her statement comes at the end of a month of a non-declared faction that’s claiming that the party lies and conceals documents, that it had no right to keep Negrete from being at the May Day rally, i.e., no right to exercise discipline over its members.

So it’s a pretty simple question: Do you want to be in an organization with someone who has said that, or do you agree that she ought to be expelled? So it’s not very pleasant that there’s a lot of nervous questioning of this expulsion in the Bay Area.

I think it was expressed most clearly by Valerie who has said—the most obvious things—“I’m against summary expulsions except in extreme cases,” “I don’t know what she was really thinking” and “It would have been cleaner to just drop her.” And then there was questioning by Mark K. and, I believe, Lisa whether it’s “right” to expel someone for their ideas. Meanwhile, after Nelson gave a report to the San Francisco local, the SF exec decided that they need another report—by Jane! And members of the local are wondering what the New York local really thought at the time—implying that, well, if they didn’t expel her, maybe the PB shouldn’t have. Javier called Janet in New York and asked a bunch of poking questions like: Why didn’t we get to see Socorro’s deposition at the trial? How did Negrete vote? And before all that, Kathleen apparently—we didn’t find out until lately—was very upset that Socorro hadn’t been given enough time to prepare for trial.

Now in the last few days a lot of people have been backtracking after “reading the documents” or “reading a lot of Cannon” or “listening to the I.S. tapes.” But it’s not like this is a deep political question that one needs to have a lot of historical knowledge to get. Nelson said at one of our meetings recently that when the delegation went in to Mexico to deal with the political questions of Negrete’s dispute with the I.S. over LM and the way he ran the Mexican section, that Negrete was trying to turn that into a juridical question and that people here now seem to want to turn a juridical question into a political one. To all of those people who now say they’ve changed their minds, I ask: Where in god’s name were your gut impulses? Here’s a question of protection of the party from a hostile element who has declared that there is nothing that would stop her from running to the bourgeois state because it’s more “just” than the party.

Comrades here are worried about “thought crimes” and want to make a distinction between what one says and what one does. I would remind them that we would not tolerate a member making a racist slur to another person, inside or outside the party. In fact we expelled Barry from Cleveland for calling the black girlfriend of a member an “Aunt Jemima”—a reflection of the fact that he spent too much time in white racist bars. What if somebody got up at a local meeting and said they saw no difference between the party’s treatment of black comrades and that received at the hands of the slavocracy? Nelson made the point that in Australia a member of Workers Power accused us of murdering our comrade Martha; would we want to be in the same organization with that person? It’s not just a question of thinking and speaking; there is such a thing as “fighting words.” Membership in this organization is based on agreement with our principles and acceptance of our program and discipline—this in fact, comrades, is a thought.

There are some links between the “non” faction fight that’s roaring in the International and the squeamishness about Socorro. Norden’s “group” cannot see a way out in the wake of the collapse of the SU except to chase after non-proletarian forces which requires that he grind the edge off the knife of our program. This is classic centrism: you give occasional lip service to the revolutionary program while seeking deals with other forces on a non-programmatic basis, usually where each gets to do their own thing on their national terrain. Comrades here in rejecting the expulsion of Socorro are busy grinding the edge off the knife of our Leninist organization.

There has been for a while a deep parochialism and disinterest in the welfare of the party out here. Two very notable examples which make the link: One is when Jorge came back from Mexico, sent in as part of a delegation to try and save a section which looked very clearly like Negrete was about to take out of the ICL to assuage his own petty egotism, the only two people who wanted to know what happened were Alma and Angelo; nobody else cared. And two weeks ago, Alma was in doing emergency translation of the transcript of Nelson’s presentation to the German national conference, one of the key fights in our International which had been hidden from the Mexican section, and she was in here trying to get it done before their meeting the next weekend. And Mark K., who was DO at the time, threw her out of the office without inquiring what she was working on or why because it was time for him to go home—time-serving. And the exec was there that night, they probably didn’t know what Alma was working on but they didn’t care because they were just there for an exec meeting; they told Mark “you better put Alma on BART”—and left.

As part of the fight in this district in the wake of ignoring except in the most passive way the teachers strike, we voted a motion which referred to a “lack of appetite to engage, where possible, as the revolutionary party, reflective of a demoralization and despair that the SL cannot have an effect on the world in which we live.” The corollary to that is that if you don’t have the appetite to engage, you don’t need a party that’s ready to engage—you don’t need a Leninist combat party that constantly prepares itself to lead the working class to power. So what difference does it make who’s in it or whether it can protect itself?

The Social Democracy in Germany believed in “the party of the whole class” which meant that opportunists could co-exist in the same party with revolutionaries. So if you don’t need a combat party, it really does become “too bad”—as Valerie said to Jane—that we had to politically smash Negrete and Socorro; when Socorro makes a declaration of hatred to the party, there really is no need to throw her out, after all, because we can afford to just wait around and see if she’ll act on what she said she was going to do.

Now not everybody feels that way. There are still a lot of us around who believe in the need of the Leninist vanguard party that can lead the working class—not as something to give lip service to but to practice. It is the meaning of the fight that Lenin waged in 1903, that we will have only people in our ranks who believe in our principles and accept our program and discipline. Tanner passed around a passage from the SWP’s 1940 convention which I thought was very apt, and I’ll just read a portion of it here:

Now Robertson made a point in his document “On Norden’s Antics,” which I think has been circulated, that Norden in his talk about Socorro needing a lawyer at the trial and Socorro declaiming party injustice are acting like the party is an alien force that wants to put them in prison. And Robertson said well, that’s understandable—for them, the ICL has become a prison because our discipline has put a constraint on their alien political positions. Democratic-centralism is the organizational form that fits a revolutionary combat party; it is neither necessary nor useful for a socialist club which does not exist to struggle for power. And there are a number of people out here who seem to be just serving time in a Trotsky Memorial Society; they’re too scared to leave, having been in this party their entire adult lives, but they’re increasingly alienated from the tasks set out and the discipline that’s required to do the job. When I mentioned this to Robertson, he protested: But Kendall, even a Trotsky Memorial Society would expel someone who declared they were going to spit on Trotsky’s gravestone!

[Seymour: Any German Social Democrat who compared the party unfavorably to Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany would have been thrown out!]

There does seem to be an “anti-bureaucratic” streak that has run through particularly the Oakland local for quite some time. Karen C. addressed it in her document. She said that the leadership in the Oakland local has been pretty bad but that there’s a disdain, as distinct from criticism, that some of the membership has for the leadership. It was expressed by Linda when we were talking to her about Don C.’s criticism of her talk and her nasty response, accusing him of race-baiting her. She said that she thought Don’s document was a prelude to disciplinary action—and Mark K. agreed with her. And then we have Valerie, who says “the bad thing about expelling someone for what they say is that a lot of people around her are afraid to express what they’re really thinking.” So the party is somehow portrayed as a big bureaucracy to whom you dare not utter your thoughts. Beside the fact that this is patently untrue, one does wonder what the thoughts are in Valerie’s head.

Jeanne sent in another quote from Cannon, from the ’52–53 period, in the fight against Cochran and Clarke. Talking about the necessity of steeling the party against internalization of the objective situation—they’d just come off of a period with no class struggle and the witchhunt—Cannon says:

So I think that the reaction to Socorro’s expulsion out here isn’t surprising: This is a district that has not been well led in a political manner for some time and certainly where lately the fights have not been made to “steel the party.” Partly on account of that and because of the objective circumstances, there are a lot of people who don’t want to do the work anymore; they feel that party tasks are a pain in the ass and that the leadership is a bureaucratic morass. There are a number of people who have been completely silent on Socorro’s expulsion but probably share some of these sentiments. Well, comrades, you are seeing some leadership in having this discussion tonight, and I don’t suspect everybody will like it very well. I thought Steve H. captured something in the Oakland local meeting where he said he’d always suspected that the comrades elected him as organizer out of some kind of non-aggression pact. Well, if you don’t like it, it’s probably time to figure out what you really want: A social club with a socialist veneer or a Leninist combat party.

Nelson: I was thinking about the conversation I had with Valerie. I said to her, “If one of our members said the same thing as the Workers Power guy, would you be for the expulsion?” She said, “Oh, of course.” I said, “But you’re not for Socorro’s, therefore it’s a question of degree. You view a statement that one of us killed Martha Phillips as worthy of a summary expulsion, someone not fit to be in the party. But someone who said this [pointing to wall poster of Socorro’s remarks to the New York local meeting] can be in the party. This isn’t extreme enough.” It’s a question of degree, some sliding scale.

That provoked other thoughts in my mind. If a contact came up to us and said, “I’ve been watching your organization. I know your people. I’ve been around different locals. You say a lot of good things. I like your paper. But my impression of your organization is that if someone in your party gets in trouble, they’ll get no better treatment than a rapist in a bourgeois court.” You’d say, “get the hell out of here.” That would be an instant response. I can’t imagine anybody, the soggiest person around here not reporting back, “Why even bother talking to this scum?” I think that’s true.

So what’s the difference? Socorro was a member here for 18 years. Go back to the ’53 fight in the SWP. Cannon ran into resistance to making a fight and it’s expressed in a number of the documents. One of them happens to be a letter to Ted Grant. Cannon said: People are treating this like a break in the family. But there’s no family in a revolutionary party. Our association is based on programmatic agreement. We’re not supposed to be trained in guerrilla warfare. These people have been attacking our party for a year, he said about the Cochranites.

So I think there’s a sense of family, “poor Socorro.” Valerie said to somebody (I heard it this afternoon) about Socorro and Negrete, “Isn’t it sad.” No! It’s not sad. You can take a step back like Robertson did about Norden. But when someone challenges the very fundamental programmatic basis of the party as Norden has been doing in Germany; as happened with Gino in Italy; the French Central Committee, a big section of it; Norden’s operation in Brazil and, through his alter ego Negrete, in Mexico. We’ve been under attack, and rather intensively, for the last couple of years. You can push the line backward further and find partial expressions going back to the ’93 nasty clique stuff in WV.

In Italy, under the pressure of the strikes, we got Gino being a reflection of the centrists in our party, who in turn were capitulating to the reformists of Rifondazione Comunista—the unlimited general strike as an economist cover for popular frontism. Then our French section had for a long time, longer than we understood, basically a non-aggression pact with the OROs and balked when a red leaflet was written for them in New York; they wouldn’t hand it out. This was under the pressure of events.

People read the motions. I don’t know what you think. Some comrades respond politically and come up with the issues, assimilate it. But to others I think it must be some distant, benign struggle. Oh, the fight, yeah we had another fight, there’s always fights. But all of a sudden it comes home and it’s somebody you know. It’s “poor old Socorro” who said repeatedly in her goddamn letters, “18 year member…why Camila was only five years old when I was…blah, blah, blah.” So it was rather piquant that she was reduced to candidate membership for one week for every year of her membership. Too bad it wasn’t Negrete, it would be 23 weeks.

When it’s a “family” matter, what that really means is you go all the way back to before 1903. Mark pointed out in Lenin and the Vanguard Party that Lenin didn’t actually generalize on what course he had been taking until World War I and realized then that the positions accumulated in a series of fights in the Russian section were actually now splitting the international, driven by the question of social chauvinism and the war, social patriotism. But he had, in practice, broken from the party of the whole class. What that really means is more like Norman Thomas’ all-inclusive party—a social-democratic conception that a socialist party can have a revolutionary wing and an opportunist wing and, presumably, with the outbreak of the first imperialist war, a social-chauvinist wing. Lenin, in practice, broke from that.

We’re not an all-inclusive party. We’re a programmatically defined party. We strive for homogeneity in our party. If the spread is too wide, that’s not good. You expect to have a certain spectrum in the party. It’s healthy to have that, to have a certain clash of different pulls and pressures. But underneath it all our purpose and our organizational methods and our rules derive from our intent to sweep away every government on the face of the earth. That kind of a party isn’t some squishy, social-democratic, all-inclusive party.

The implication is that all of a sudden we’re bureaucratic. All the questioning had a logic to it, that there’s some linear continuation of the political fight in Mexico about Brazil, about Mexico, the way they ran the Mexican section as a second-class section, hid from them all the major fights in order that Negrete—not just Negrete in some personal way, but Negrete as a representative of other alien impulses (acting in concert with Norden)—could more easily manipulate the section. Norden did the same thing in Germany in a somewhat different way—purged out of the leadership rather systematically, from 1992 on, all the older TLDers. He had a certain umbrella rationale for this, these were the social basis in the party for social democracy. So what he got was an organization that was pliable. He got Mike J., a junior guy. He got Adam—he’s taken off like a rocket in Brazil, he’s done terrific work there, but under Norden’s hammering in Germany he felt unsure of himself so he was pliable. A fear of somehow this party has, inexplicably, now become bureaucratic and will expel you for a certain range of political differences with the party, seeing the expulsion as simply a linear continuation of that, implies and begs social-democratic politics. That is a different kind of party based on a different goal.

Norden’s after something else, Norden and Negrete. Their profile emerges pretty clearly in what they have been soft pedaling with Luta Metalúrgica. Once we got our hands on it, and Adam went in there (then later Camila), we started having fights from the moment he hit the ground. Norden and Negrete conciliated all the questions that we had fights on. They knew about them, and conciliated them. Now that doesn’t warrant an expulsion but it does mean that the programmatic basis of our party is under attack. At some point in this Socorro, in her head, quit.

You get alienation from the party. With Mark and Linda—to think that Don C.’s perfectly warranted and correct political criticism of a defective presentation at Laney was some kind of prelude to organizational moves—that’s a reflex of some kind that “Hey, this party would do this to me just because I screwed up in this Laney presentation.” That reflex on your part was social-democratic because the party hasn’t changed. One could say in the abstract, “Well, gee, wouldn’t it be possible the party could suddenly become bureaucratic?” No, nothing happens suddenly. It’s visible and there’s a relationship between politics and organizational methods. Intensively, almost continuously since whenever the Italy fight broke out in ’94—Italy to France to Germany to Mexico—we’ve been doing nothing but fighting, which is a reflection of the enormous pressures that are on us in this new period, the New World Order. All this stuff now is becoming real for a lot of people here.

You look at our Australian section right now and they’re giving a new meaning to centrism. Centrism is often defined as revolutionary in words, opportunist in deeds. Their variant is revolutionary in words and nothing in deeds. They’ve made an art form out of abstention and indifference. They even state it in some of their motions: We are indifferent to the privatization of major shipping lines; we are indifferent to this march of 15,000 women; Keith is only involved in social work wanting us to support asylum by very leftist Iraqi Kurds. And then, the worst of all, was when they sat at a goddamn table and allowed this Workers Power guy to sneer at them and say, “You people killed Martha.” Bonnie bragged that, “We didn’t respond to this, we didn’t rise to the provocation.” What that meant is that they’ve got nothing inside them about Spartacism. It was a humiliation of our party. To sit there and take that kind of insult—insult isn’t the right word—is a measure of extreme deterioration, under the pressure of the Australian social-democratic labor movement, isolation, but mainly in the envelope of the world without the Soviet Union. For our opponents there’s no limits. They can say anything they want. The ISO here can talk about “we stand in the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party.” You couldn’t have got that out of them with a branding iron before the Soviet Union went down. These guys were stone anti-communists all the way back.

So these pressures are on our party and particularly here in the American section because there’s been lots of nothing really since the end of the Vietnam War. Then the ideological pressure got more intense with Reagan’s election, and the air traffic controllers strike and the cutting down of the labor movement. We’re not trained for a peace-time existence and we’ve had stagnation imposed on us here. That’s just additional pressure.

Then you get this local which has, as far back as I can remember, been an older local. When we had trade-union fractions, the most heavily industrialized, i.e., the most subject to trade-union ideology. We took a lot of quits out of here on that basis and in other locals too that had trade-union fractions. All this comes to a head here when “poor Socorro, 18 years, our good comrade, gee I remember when….” But people change, their politics change. Under pressure they start to take a different path. Their feet start to walk. It’s not conscious. They just begin to have impulses that are at variance with the formal program of the party.

We’ve been in battle with these guys. It’s moving very rapidly. I don’t expect that Norden and Stamberg and Negrete are going to be in the party very long. But it’s going to be their decision. If they step out of line and do something to warrant an expulsion, to trigger something, all right, we can accommodate them. But by and large, it’s better the minority takes the initiative. We make sure that the political fight is waged until there is complete understanding. We did that, and then some, in ’68 with the Ellensites—numerous provocations, overt breaches of discipline. We could have thrown them out three times. And we didn’t, until it was clear to everyone what they were really all about, namely a syndicalist assault on our Leninist conceptions, Leninist party.

So I tell you, if you don’t think that’s worth being expelled for [pointing to wall poster of Socorro’s remarks]…. For her to say this to us—especially here, this rape was not that long ago and this was the most rotten way she could think of, in her experience and our experience—was in effect to say “FUCK YOU!, I hate you people. In my mind there’s no difference between you and some bourgeois court who treats a rapist better than me.” When Robertson called me up and told me that, I didn’t have to think about it, wring my hands, “Oh, gee, poor Socorro how sad.” Robertson said, “Summary expulsion.” I said, “Right! Good riddance!” And if you didn’t have that reflex, all you 20-25 year people, then you’ve got some green fuzz growing on your brain. Except it has a name; it’s called some other politics, centrism in some form. But it’s not even centrism—your lights are going out.