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"Now the bosses are raising a scare – the Red Scare. They pay stools to go around whispering that so-and-so, usually a militant union leader, is a Red. What the bosses actually mean, however, is not that he is really a red. They mean they do not like him because he is a loyal, dependable union man, a fighter who helps his brothers and sisters and is not afraid of the boss. So let us all be careful that we do not play the bosses’ game by falling for the Red Scare. No union man worthy of that name will play the bosses’ game. Some may do so through ignorance—but those who peddle the Red Scare and know what they are doing are dangerous enemies of the union.” --Walter Reuther quoted on page 118 of UE History “Them and Us.” This quote fascinates me, partly because it's true but also because it shows the nature of political opportunism. Reuther probably said this back in the 1930s when he was very close to the CPUSA. In the 1940's, he took over the UAW and then the CIO on a wave of red-baiting!
Being a candidate for public office is probably the fastest way to learn politics, publicity, and public speaking. While I was teaching at the magnet school, the SWP decided to run me for Congress against one of the most liberal congressmen in Texas. Why they picked that particular candidate to run me against may take some explaining.
In American electoral politics, the Socialist Workers Party considered left-wing Democrats worse than right-wing Republicans. They considered both political parties to be essentially the same, as both represented the wealthy class. The liberal politicians were seen as worse “mis-leaders” in that they promised a better America but never delivered. Given a choice, SWP tended to run candidates against the most progressive candidates they could find.
There was a practical side of it, too, for SWP. They explained that their socialist candidates would be pulling voters away from the liberal side of the electorate, and those on the liberal side would be more likely to go “further left” and join the SWP.
SWP believed that their own success as a growing political party was pretty much the entire name of the game -- in electoral work, in the women’s movement, in the anti-war movement, and in all politics. Whether or not a given movement or cause was successful was a secondary goal of the SWP, their primary goal was to recruit more members to their own organization. The argument was that only a revolution in America could solve problems, and the only road to revolution lay through the growth of their own party.
To understand the followers of Leon Trotsky in America more broadly, it is necessary to look at their origin. Trotsky was one of the most flamboyant of the revolutionaries of October, 1917. He went on to lead the Red Army in the ensuing civil war. Prior to the last few months of the revolution, he had headed his own group and was not a Bolshevik. After he joined, though, he served with considerable distinction. Many of the American references to the Russian revolution say it was led by “Lenin and Trotsky.” After the overthrow, Trotsky led the Red Army during their civil war.
In 1928, his disagreements with the old Bolsheviks led to his expulsion. For the rest of his life, he argued that the main problem of the Soviet Union, and of the worldwide revolutionary movement, was that he wasn’t leading it. His followers continued that theme even after he was murdered in 1941. The followers of Trotsky believed, and I think they still believe, that all aspects of the struggle for change are hindered by failure to acknowledge Trotskyite leadership.
Trotsky wrote that all the elements for world revolution had already been met except for the “subjective factor” of Trotskyite leadership. He said that the conditions were ripe for revolution and had become, “in fact, somewhat rotten.”
Consequently, the growth and success of their own organization(s) (they splintered far and wide even before Trotsky was dead) was their paramount consideration.
To me, it made sense at the time, and it took me 8 ½ years to outgrow it. I liked it because I had come in with the mindset against the Soviet Union and I appreciated being around people who disliked it even more than I did and had what seemed like sound ideological reasoning behind them.
I found it flattering to be around people who read a great deal and who put great store by who had read what. I also appreciated the SWP because the hippies around Houston hated their guts, and my esteem for the counterculture had been sinking for years. If the hippies didn’t like them, I reasoned, they must be OK. I especially liked the SWP attitude toward dope. They strictly forbade it, thereby in a single stroke solving one of the greatest problems of the youth movement of the period!
I think I read just about everything in the SWP bookstore, and talked about it everywhere I went. To some, I might have seemed a farsighted prophet, but to most I was probably a fanatical bore.
I learned a lot about American election laws and campaigning while running for Congress. I learned how tolerant and easy-going, politically, the African American community of Houston was. I learned how difficult it is to challenge the preconceived beliefs of young Anglos. I learned to distinguish between progressives who esteem the human race and nationalists, often the allies of progressives, who literally hate people who don’t share their national interests. Everywhere I went, I probed the depth and width of anticommunism.
I gave a lot of speeches, participated in a lot of interviews, and generated a lot of publicity. At the end, I gathered, I think, 150 votes against several tens of thousands for my opponent. We considered the campaign a big success!
The SWP ideology, if accepted, has very few internal contradictions. It rounds out to a near-perfect whole, once one agrees with the basic premise that SWP leadership is the only missing element in a world eager for revolution.
I guess I sound like a simpleton, and I have to confess it’s true. But nobody could convince me 1973-1982 that I hadn’t found the perfect formula for social change in America.
Former girlfriends and university colleagues were embarrassed to find me on street corners selling The Militant. Former supporters of my activities shunned my requests for money for SWP causes. Former friends dumped me. These problems were cushioned by the internal social life of the group. We were very close. Most of our sex partners were members of the same 50 or so SWPers. If we were attracted to someone outside the movement, we made it a condition of our affection that they had to join. “Horizontal recruiting” was an inside joke, but it was also very real and ongoing. Almost everybody in my commune joined after I did.
Most of the SWP members were much more incestual than I was. They considered it suspicious that I still found friends and sex partners outside the organization. Most of them had been sent into Houston from more progressive parts of the U.S. and only knew one another. I had lived in the Houston area for years before joining, and in the Southwest nearly all my life; and I was older.
My first main assignment was as a fund raiser. I did some educational work within the organization and taught classes on Lenin, Marx & Engels, and Trotsky’s works. I don’t know if I could say that I was happy, but I was darned sure busy. We won, as everybody knows, the struggle to end the draft and then the war in Vietnam. The SWP began to look for new ways to engage, and they decided that smaller community struggles needed more of their attention. They divided the Houston Branch of 50 or more into smaller groups. They sent a group to Dallas and started three smaller branches within Houston.
After the 1975 “turn to the tiny branches,” I helped lead a police brutality fight that mushroomed into an international scandal. It was exciting, and relatively easy, to line up Black community leaders against the incident in which a mentally challenged young street preacher, brandishing a Bible, had been gunned down by two overeager policemen. Their excuse was that they thought he was waving a gun. My long experience as a publicist came in handy, and the SWP taught me a lot about approaches to individuals with leaflets and other materials.
In 1976, the SWP more or less declared that the turn to the tiny branches had been a disaster. They made another big turn, this time toward the unions. The miners union had been shaken from the top, and then the Steelworkers had a highly controversial, progressive candidate run for president, Ed Sadlowsky. The Sadlowsky campaign convinced the SWP that the time was right for American progressives, especially the student movement, to re-focus their attention on the unions after a long, long, absence. They insisted that every member drop whatever they were doing and get a union job, preferably in the Steelworkers union. Later on, they changed to the Autoworkers Union, then the Meatpacking union. After that, I lost track.
Like everything else they did, SWP made getting union jobs a campaign. The pressure was immediate and constant on all members. Some voted with their feet and left the organization. A few of the highly esteemed intellectuals of the anti-war days made an effort to become factory workers, then dropped out when reality overtook them. I argued that the "turn to industry" was a good idea, and I had already taken a union job, but that there was no reason for the organization to make a fetish of it. They didn't need to abandon the various “movements” that were more likely to result in new recruits to the organization. We were shrinking because hardly any trade unionists were joining, and SWP still had a lot of appeal in the women’s movement, student’s movement, gay movement, etc. Wasn’t the point of everything we do, I argued, to recruit more people to the organization? That was the argument that eventually took me out of the Socialist Workers Party.
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