The petite bourgeois split inside the Socialist Workers Party.

By David Rowlands. 02-10-2024

All views expressed within are my own.

Above: Female coal miners in West Virgina. I knew these pioneers, back in the day.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum. As I was walking towards the hallowed halls of Harvard University, during the summer of 1980, I noticed a poster plastered on a pole announcing a split within the Revolutionary Communist Party.

Twas a sunny day and I was in the company of my best bud Walsh, Dave Walsh that is, who was not only a good friend and comrade but also a great drinking buddy. He had a sense of humor wholly unmatched by anyone now or then and I’d give my allotment of diamonds and rust for one more chance to hear his monologue detailing the sex life of James Robertson.

We stared at the broadside in silence, taking in the best we could the call to arms of the outs who were once the ins, appealing to the ins who were once the outs — or something like that.

The Maoists were very dramatic about things like this, which made us chuckle. We informed each another how happy we were that a similar predicament would never happen to our own Party, the mighty Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Dave and I were hooked on the comings and goings of the left-wing sects, which I’m not especially proud of, but which never-the-less contributed to our tight bond, along with a love of Guinness Stout and women with brown hair and blue eyes.

The previous year we attended a Bob Avakian speaking engagement, and despite the fact that he drew a larger than expected crowd, we were promptly spotted and identified as the Trotskyite wreckers we were. Joe Auciello was there too, but he was in disguise sitting in the back row, dressed as a bag lady from Central Square. I could feel the heat on the back of my neck as the Red Guards sitting behind us trained bolts of lightning in our direction.

But The Chairman was in great form, and we loved his performance, even though he went on for three hours past my bedtime. Although Caucasian, he spoke with an Afro-American dialect that was quite entertaining, although, at the same time, creepy. Thankfully, we made it out in one piece, but I was so scared my rectum began to vibrate.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, save me from the pit for which I am now engulfed.”

Above: Big Bob at the time I saw him speak. He doesn’t look as scary today as he did then.

Above: The Spartacus League covered the calamity within American Maoism.

Mind you, at one time Big Bob’s organization had some heft, at least until 1979 when China invaded Vietnam as a gesture of goodwill towards Jimmy Carter, but soon thereafter it became cultish and extremely weird. 

However, the problem with the RCP was you never knew when one of them was going to punch you in the nose, so you always had to be aware of your surroundings whenever you found yourself in their presence. But I was friends with benefits with one of their sympathizers, so my existence was more or less tolerated. The last I heard; Big Bob urged a vote for Joseph Biden against Donald Trump during the 2020 presidential election, and thus he came full circle with his class collaborationist roots in the Bay area during the 1960’s.

But now I digress.

Less than a year later, out of nowhere it seemed, the SWP became embroiled in a faction fight of its own, which, because of my untrained eye and unrestrained optimism, caught me completely off guard. I was new to this sort of thing, having joined the Party only two years prior, and a split was the last thing I expected to happen. I thought it more likely I’d start pooping soft serve than for the SWP to suffer a serious fracture.

Of course, the more experienced comrades and the central leadership saw it coming, but I was taken a back, stunned and quite surprised. Walsh wasn’t though, he had become sympathetic to the splitters early on, for reasons I will never understand, and had access to the inside dope. The was the end of the line for me and Dave, although I still love him and carry the good times we shared in my heart.

In 1980, the SWP was at the height of its powers. It was perhaps the largest it had ever been in its entire history, was dominate within the left — the “left” being a completely different animal than the ISO-type cluster fuck it is today — was recruiting at a respectable pace and was still attracting young people amidst the dying embers of the mass movements.

The Party had no less than four publications and could boast a “Look Us Up” list on the last page of the Militant that contained the addresses of approximately fifty branches. The subscription drives would net tens of thousands of new readers, and the Party sponsored a viable youth organization, the Young Socialist Alliance. In addition, the Party was beginning to attain name recognition across a wide swath of the country.

But that’s what happens during a period of mass movements and in its aftermath, even when these movements begin to demobilize. The opposite is true as well; when big things cease to stir within the class struggle, party building and recruitment suffers as a result.

The organization had sufficient strength to, along with the Boston chapter of the NAACP, engage the racists who roamed the streets of Boston during the battle to desegregate the public schools (1974-1976), and to bring the fight to a respectable draw. A draw that is between the Black community and the more racist wing of the Democratic Party.

Above: The late Maceo Dixon. Maceo was a beloved party member and a central organizer of the defense of the Black schoolchildren during the Battle of Boston.

But this was, in large part, an illusion, for underneath the Party’s handsome exterior was a large number of members who were recruited during the mass movements of the 1960’s and the early 1970’s, especially the movement against the war in Vietnam. Or to be more precise, they were recruited to the antiwar movement and then joined the Party that led the antiwar movement.

But all things must pass, including political generations.

Many came along for the ride, at least for a time, but when world-wide upsurge came to an end, they realized that working in an industrial setting and talking socialism with co-workers who liked to hunt was not going to be a part of their agenda going forward. Plus, many or even most never understood communism and Marxism, and would have been lost in a steel mill, or for that matter, anywhere outside of a college campus. They were twenty-year-olds who became thirty-year-olds, or thirty-year-olds who became forty-year-olds, and time marches on.

This class composition of the party was eventually going to be a problem and this obvious negative was, in my opinion, reflected in the somewhat social democratic tint of the Party’s 1976 Presidential campaign. But that’s me looking back, I was a 20-year-old member of the Young Socialist Alliance in Columbus, Ohio at the time, and was a huge fanboy of Peter Camejo and the ’76 campaign. And in many ways, it was a good campaign.

Above: Mass action against the war in Vietnam. Many members of the SWP, around the time of the turn to industry and in the years after, would become perplexed when they discovered that the political reality had changed to such a degree that past tactics and strategies could no longer be put in place by using the same formulas. In other words, they found out that you cannot suck a mass movement out of your thumb. This was tragically confirmed recently when a modest grouping of former members in Chicago thought they could reboot the reproductive rights movement with past incantations.

But they made important contributions towards the forward march of humanity by coming to the aid of the Vietnamese people and by joining the fight against Jim Crown segregation, and then by joining the struggle for the rights of women, and for that we thank them for their service.

All that aside, it still seemed to me, as a rookie observer, to be an odd time to launch a campaign to break-up the Party.

In early 1978 the National Committee plenum voted unanimously to begin the turn toward the industrial working-class, the natural milieu of any communist party worthy of the name. That is, when the political conditions allow such a party to function in an open manner. And by the mid to late 1970’s the determination was made that the long detour away from our class, which began thirty years prior, was coming to a close

Above: The Newport News strike of 1979 heralded changes within the working-class, including workers in the south.

At first there was widespread enthusiasm for the project, which we all agreed would serve to transform the Party from a campus-based organization with a middle-class composition to one that was embedded inside the working-class. This in turn would make it possible to build a communist tendency within the labor movement.

Unfortunately, the labor movement, or more accurately, the labor bureaucracy, went MIA about this time, beginning with the betrayal of the PATCO workers, which heralded a serious downturn that could not have been predicted, and which continues to this day.

For this and other reasons, the Party didn’t necessarily encounter what we expected to find when we arrived at the factory gate. But the turn did transform the Party, and had it not been made and reinforced throughout the years the SWP would have been destroyed, by the prevailing winds of bourgeois public opinion. It would have been rendered indistinguishable from rest of the middle-class left, from World Outlook to the absolutely insane Workers World Party.

But it soon became evident that not everyone was onboard with the colonization of industry, or that everyone had the same idea of what work inside a factory, mine or mill would look like.

As 1978 dawned, a large majority of the members were employed in comfortable jobs: teachers, ward clerks in hospitals, restaurant workers, bookstore and retail employees; civil servants, campus janitors, receptionists and secretaries. No one was getting rich, but it paid the bills, plus it was cool in the summer and warm in the winter and there was very little in the way of overtime.

The desire to stay politically and emotionally implanted in the year 1971, the peak year of the antiwar movement, not realizing that the times had changed and not willing to upend one’s life to work in a factory was reason number one for the split.

Reason number two was the dispute over The Permanent Revolution, in which Atip Oto laid out theoretical positions years before that were now being challenged by the Party leadership.

Above: Perter Camejo, the SWP’s candidate for President in 1976. The first inkling any of us had that something was amiss was when Camejo abruptly abandoned his Party assignments in the summer of 1981 with no notice to the National Committee and moved back to Venezuela. He ended his political career with the Green Party in the United States where he advocated sanctions against the Iraqi people as a way to avoid a hot war and took to referring to undocumented workers as “illegal aliens”.

With the advent of the revolutionary upsurge in Central America and the growing strength and influence of the African National Conference led by Nelson Mandela, many within the Party began to examine the approach of Trotsky versus Lenin on the question of the workers and farmers government, or sometimes referred to as the Democratic Dictatorship of the Workers and Peasants.

But not to worry my lovelies, because I’m not going to get into the weeds on any of that, because that wasn’t the real reason for the split, that was the fake reason. But it provided a reasonable excuse for those leaving to have something to bitch about on their way out the door.

Why? Because the Party doesn’t take a position for or against how any comrade will assess a historical work, be it The Revolution Betrayed, The Communist Manifesto or the Permanent Revolution.

1980 was also the year Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as President of the United States, and hindsight being 20-20, I do believe this had an effect on the moral of a percentage of those who were inclined towards the exit signs, in a similar way that the election of Donald Trump disorientated many within the Party’s periphery beginning in 2015.

Ronald Reagan was a conservative, and to the simpler minds, if what the Party was saying about the potential to work within the industrial working-class was true, then Ronald should not have been electable.

The pre-convention discussion that commenced in the spring of 1981, and which lasted six months leading up to the Party convention that convened in Ohio, was a sight to see and constituted the closest thing I will ever come to a functioning soviet.

An exercise in democracy like none I had seen before or since. Open and free debate across the country with representatives of the minorities being flown into any branch that they requested to have a hearing before. In Boston, Nat Weinstein appeared and spoke unhindered for the better part of a weekend. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t get a fair chance to air their views, but rather that the overwhelming majority of comrades did not agree with them.

Of course, this is never easy for a minority to accept, but all of the candidates of the SWP present the same stance, and you have to have some way of determining what stance that’s going to be. You can’t have one candidate or speaker calling for the building of a Fourth Internationalist party in Cuba and another set of speakers saying there is no need.

Above: Nat Weinstein. A nice fellow he was.

All questions were up for debate: the workers and farmers government, the Nicaraguan revolution and the FSLN, the dynamics of the South African revolution, the situation inside Poland and El Salvador, the Cuban revolution and its leadership, and union tactics and strategy which included the debate over the advisability of taking union posts.

And then we voted. A good guesstimate is that the majority won 90% of the votes, although the minority did elect delegates from a number of branches that were seated at the Party convention in August of 1981. The minority members knew that this outcome was unlikely to change in any significant way, and with that realization the problems began in earnest. They promised to abide by the decisions of the convention and await future events to clarify the issues, but they didn’t keep their promises.

The next two years consisted of unbridled flaunting of the norms and a continuous game of whackamole, as the party delegated precious time and effort to stamp out the problems as they appeared across the country.

Then the fistfights and the pushing and shoving started inside the bookstores, followed by their last act of defiance, super-glueing the lock to the door of the National Office

Not cool, man!

Above: The Nicaraguan Revolution.

As a person who is active on social media, you might be surprised to know how many young people, and I mean those in their twenties and thirties, who were born decades after the events in question, are seemingly obsessed with this slice of party history. Middle-class radicals who take for good coin the assertion made by what remains of those who led the split, of how the Party expelled everyone in sight in an undemocratic manner. Of course, this is complete hogwash.

First of all, most of those in question resigned and the relatively small number who were expelled were expelled after repeated warnings and after second and third chances to reign in their disloyal behavior. In fact, Socialist Action, which was the dominate organization constituted by the splitters, anointed with the task to return the Party to the glory days of the 1970’s, expelled far more people than the SWP ever did. Heck, Jeff Mackler would expel half the membership of SA in an afternoon, on more than one occasion.

You would need a Zen diagram to track the organizational trajectory of the splitters. They first emerged with two organizations, the Fourth International Tendency and Socialist Action. After a few years of tiring over the shit-show, the FIT merged with Solidarity. SA gave birth to Socialist Unity, Socialist Organizer, Socialist Viewpoint and Socialist Resurgence. As of this writing, Socialist Action may have a dozen members, if that.

Truth be told, I didn’t pay much attention to the split at the time it was in progress. Not sure why, but I found the subject to be much more interesting years later. For starters, the members who were attracted to the split perspective where generally the dregs of the branches, the type that would never go on sales and who always had the lowest financial sustainers. There were exceptions of course, but not many. Most simply left and were never heard from or seen again.

In 1982 I left Boston for the Cincinnati branch, and while the Boston Branch had five or six minority members, Cincinnati, when I arrived had none. Two would later emerge, but the opposition was mostly led by a crazy woman with a cult of personality around her. I didn’t take much notice of her or them or it one way or the other.

Above: Yours truly at the Cincinnati Bookstore, located on Paddock Avenue, circa 1984. I’m smiling because this was the year I married Julie, and the year the split came to an end. In the background causing trouble, a youthful David Wilder (RIP).

Wilder used to say that the split had a control and a variable, the control being the Party founded by James P. Cannon and his comrades, with the variable being the unprincipled combination containing Weinstein, Bloom, Henderson and Lovell. I sure am glad the majority, under the leadership of Comrade Jack Barnes, prevailed and carried the day.