INTERNATIONAL WORKERS PARTY FOUNDING TACTICAL PERSPECTIVE

International Worker, December 1974

The first draft of the following tactical perspective was hammered out at the IWP founding conference on September 23. In the weeks following the conference, two subsequent drafts grew out of discussions among the IWP membership and periphery. Published here is the final draft.

The deepening plunge into the Second Great Depression and mass unemployment beg the emergence of a serious socialist organization.

At a time when a world depression and fascist economic onslaughts are breathing down humanity's neck, we are founding an embryonic political tendency with the purpose of forging a mass-based vanguard working-class party within two to three years. To call ours an eleventh-hour effort is, of course, an understatement. Nonetheless, we intend to succeed.

We begin young in experience and small in numbers due to the near-total vacuum that has prevailed on the U.S. Left for over a generation. That vacuum has now been intensified by the lawfully spectacular degeneration of the "Left hegemonic" National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), which we entered in June of this year in the spirit of organizational self-criticism and self-development, and-finding that spirit utterly lacking throughout the NCLC-were forced to leave in August. We are continuing to orient toward the NCLC in a ruthless, united-front fashion, in the hope (initially) of setting it back on a revolutionary course. Our hope was grounded in the fact that the NCLC, as opposed to the entire rest of the Left, had manifested within recent years distinctive revolutionary, working-class-for-itself qualities-qualities which placed it apparently on the road to becoming a vanguard party.

Mass Work

The historic conjuncture is ripe for mass work among the class. The deepening plunge into the Second Great Depression and mass unemployment-which must create numerous outbursts of enraged but undirected ferment-compellingly begs the emergence of a serious and disciplined socialist organization that will begin preparing those alternative working class (soviet) institutions that must become hegemonic in any future mass-strike upsurge. Otherwise, there will be nothing and no one to keep the class from falling into profound Depression demoralization and helplessness in the face of the well-organized capitalist/fascist offensive.

The real substance of our organization of the class must be the class-for-itself, the ever-expanding unification of the now-fragmented sectors of the working-class for the purpose of transforming society-not programs per se. This is not, of course, to deny the necessity for the development of transitional programs. But in this historical moment of class struggle, the development of a class-wide organization (class-for-itself) is the only context in which programs have any historical meaning. Organizing around purely technical programs in this historic period in no way attacks workers' parochial self-conceptions for it is based on organizing the members of the class in their self-interest or capitalism-determined class interest. The conceptions of self-interest or class interest arise directly from the capitalist mode of production. Thus, to organize around self-interest or class interest is merely to perpetuate capitalism.

The NCLC's organizing around "Stop Rockefeller," etc, will not do because it conveys no real sense of history. It is, rather, a pathetic and dumb generality; setting up "megalomaniac" Nelson Rockefeller as the omnipotent bogeyman while failing to address the concrete issues of working class survival-which the Rockefeller family is indeed perniciously overseeing to a large extent. The issues of food, education, health and transportation, as well as that of capitalist agents within the labor movement and working-class institutions, generally, are no mere idle artifacts of a "Rockefeller game-plan" which is implemented at U.N. conferences or in closed-door sessions of the Commission on Critical Choices. Rather, they sensuously locate the substance of the Rockefeller-directed assault against the working class; and so must be addressed seriously and from the standpoint of the socialist transformation.

In general, our organizing tactic will be one of a principled united front with all Left and labor organizations to which significant layers of the class are orienting. The specific content of the united-front agitation will unfold in the course of our organizing as we determine the concrete political/economic issues around which socialists must address the class. Our united-front efforts will by no means be wasted if and when our "fraternal" organizations refuse to enter into collaboration. We will use such refusal to organize the membership of those organizations and, indeed, to further the united-front tactic.

In conducting our mass work, we must maintain a dynamic perspective on the radicalization patterns among the class and its various sectors, on the ebbs and flows of the class struggle within the overall plunge into depression. The general trend we now observe is one of deepening potential for radicalization among the industrial proletariat, from heavy industry on down, as layoffs become the order of the day. In the ghettoes, increasing actual ferment is being channeled into Right avenues: community-control organizing, neighborhood vigilante squads, methadone work programs, etc. While this situation begs socialist intervention, we must secure a strong proletarian base before we can successfully assimilate large numbers of cadre from ghetto backgrounds. The campuses, on the other hand, are in a state of bohemian stupor-having positive significance only in their ability to tail working-class upsurges.

Orientation Toward the Labor Committees

The NCLC's longstanding strategic outlook for organizing a revolution by the end of this decade-for all the flaccidity and zigzagging that drowns it in the NCLC's practice-is correct. The drying up of world capitalism's normal channels for renewed accumulation (via expanded imperialist looting, etc.), has forced the international bourgeoisie to move toward fascist (slave-labor) modes of accumulation-thus begging the emergence of a working-class party to seize power and establish a world socialist economy within a very few years. Yet this formally correct outlook is now absolutely incapable of realization by the NCLC, given the degenerate social and political process at work within the organization. It is impossible for a Left organization to be fully bourgeoisified and bureaucratized internally, and maintain anything but the facade of revolutionary appearances in its intercourse with the working class. At best, the NCLC's strategic conceptions of the working-class-for-itself and socialist expanded reproduction have become the fossilized leftovers of what once entailed a living throb within the organization, and so much food for phrase-mongering "intellects" and "pedagogues."

The history of our association with the NCLC provides ample evidence of that organization's degeneration into sect-life. As we moved into increasing united-front collaboration with the NCLC in the spring of this year (we were then known as CFC-Centers for Change) we were able to make practically no progress in prompting the NCLC to seriously take up the theoretical differences which were becoming increasingly central to that collaboration. The NCLC's response, from its top leadership on down, was one of neurotic, ultimatist hauteur: "You must join us before you can criticize."

That we failed to fully present our differences with the NCLC in our press-thus leaving the NCLC general membership in the dark as to the real nature of the united-front relationship-only played into this ultimatist hysteria. Needless to say, when we dissolved our organization into the NCLC and took on an extremely active role in the NCLC's work our freedom of criticism increased not one iota. When we finally forced the issue of our theoretical differences, we were subject to wild and paranoid slanders emanating from the NCLC's Stalinist, self-policing rumor apparatus. The slanders reached psychotic proportions when we subsequently resigned from the NCLC. The NCLC's sectarian aversion to self-criticism-indeed to the entire outside world-is the sadly lawful outcome of the retrograde, involuted "psychotherapy" introduced over the past year by Comrade Marcus under the aegis of Beyond Psychoanalysis. That the NCLC can only scream, "Psychosexual perverts!" at its most "fearsome" enemies (including not only the FBI, but also trade-union bureaucrats and the International Workers Party) merely reflects the decrepit social relationships and officialized fantasy life of that organization.

The acid test of any political organization is the quality of its institutions of political functioning. And here the NCLC continues to wallow in the mire. Its National Executive Committee is neither executive, nor a committee. It is, rather, a loose (i.e., politically loose, whereas socially it constitutes the tightest of in-groups) circle of has-been sycophants of Comrade Marcus. It never meets seriously, nor executes any political function of import. Curiously enough, more real power is exerted by the motley confederation of "intelligence" file heads, the overseers of the various compartments of intelligence gathering. Here we have the social basis for the NCLC's late Hegelian idealism. "Potency" consists in the pristine "power of ideas," rather than in the sensuous practice of organizing the class into developing, class-for-itself institutions.

The institutions available to the NCLC's rank-and-file and periphery, i.e., those at the bottom of the idealized hierarchy, are, of course even more wretched. The semiannual, plenary national conferences are pathetic, clown-show affairs that accomplish nothing other than the "moralization" of the membership via banal/hysterical pep talks from Comrade Marcus and others. Any attempt to inject serious political discussion into these fiascoes invariably meets with "new-psychoanalytic" derision. From these pathetic conferences, institutions for political decision-making and discussion tend to radiate-in concentric circles of degeneration-out to the regional and local levels. Membership is kept completely in the dark as to the internal life of the organization in other localities, both in North America and Western Europe. Thus, petty gossip takes the place of serious discussions of organization and tactics. The development of revolutionary leadership under these conditions is obviously out of the question.

A frenzied downturn in the internal quality of the NCLC occurred during its hysterical "mass brainwashing" episode in January of this year [1974]. It was then that the NCLC's vaunted prevention of "military/fascist takeovers" in Britain and the U.S. through its doomsday "exposure" campaigns endowed the NCLC's "intelligence-gathering" with its monstrous and fantasized importance that continues up to this day. The NCLC has thus largely become an impotent "retailer and wholesaler of counterintelligence information," as announced by Comrade Marcus [Lyndon LaRouche], 12/29/73. Even more perniciously, the January episode provided the pretext for the establishment of a hooligan "security" apparatus-whose purpose was never to "protect the NCLC from the CIA," but rather to protect the NCLC from any intrusion into its "CIA-ized" fantasy world! Thus the Stalinist labeling of anyone attempting serious criticism of the organization's work as "susceptible to brainwashing," "brainwashed," "CIA dupe," "CIA agent," etc. Since January, the "security" apparatus has achieved ominously growing hegemony over the organization-choking off any possibility of creative political discussion and generally turning the NCLC sharply to the right.

Accordingly, our program for setting into motion the social and political processes that will allow the NCLC's practice to stimulate-and not cower behind its avowedly Marxist theory-is as follows:

1.       The creation of an annual, delegated, international Congress of the organization-to become the supreme body of the organization [and a] simultaneous end, of course, to the philistine "plenary" get-togethers which now charade as national conferences. The Congress will debate and adopt comprehensive theses on the nature of the world political situation and the tasks of the working-class vanguard from the standpoint of organization and tactics. These resolutions will be published, along with extensive minutes of the Congress, for wide distribution among the class. The Congress will be prepared by an extensive international discussion culminating in regional conferences throughout North America and Western Europe, which will assess their respective regional as well as the world situation and elect delegates. The first such Congress must additionally effect a serious set of task-oriented Party roles to replace the theoretically posturing and practically unprincipled "Founding Principles" drafted by Comrade Marcus [LaRouche] at the January, 1971 conference-cf. the scandalous principle No. 17, in which it is mandated, in the finest spirit of the Prussian monarch, that "Realization of socialist conceptions means that alien political ideas (so determined by whom, Comrade Marcus), have ipso facto no voting rights over the formulation of policy within the vanguard organization."

2.       The establishment of an Executive Committee (for the direction of the work between Congresses) that actually functions as a leading, executive body rather than the current coterie of figurehead buffoons. This necessarily means regular plenary meetings (of the EC) in which policy is deliberated and voted on-with the results of the discussion and votes made accessible to the membership in the form of comprehensive minutes. These basic procedures must be replicated for executive bodies functioning on the regional and local levels.

3.       An open investigation of the hooligan "Security" apparatus with an aim toward dissolving it as it now stands and reestablishing it on the basis of qualified and accountable leadership (right-to-organize).

These proposals entail no mere "structural" reforms. They demand a complete transformation in the NCLC's political practice and self-conception, from that of an in-group circle of petit bourgeois philistines to that of a vanguard force of mass revolutionary leaders. [1]

In the process of polemically engaging the NCLC and addressing particularly the advanced working-class layers that still orient towards it, we necessarily established a united-front orientation to the NCLC. Thus, we offered to support the U.S. Labor Party electoral campaigns-such as the New York gubernatorial campaign of that hapless populist, Tony Chaitkin-and strived to arrange common rallies, platform speeches, etc. The NCLC, thanks to its paranoid response to our united front proposals branding us as a "CIA countergang" placed itself essentially in the position that the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) faced in 1970-72 when the NCLC intervened into the antiwar movement mushily organized by these two centrist swamps with a united front, working-class perspective. The NCLC leadership's rottenness and sectarianism now stands naked before the rank-and-file and to the working class generally-who will increasingly look to us as an alternative leadership.

The NCLC, in the best tradition of the centrist sect, adopted the policy of barring IWP members from its public (sic) meetings and classes as of September 8, 1974. And, prior to this, the NCLC had incredibly spurned the IWP's united front cooperation around the U.S. Labor Party electoral campaign petitioning. And in Detroit, where expanding IWP penetration into the heavy industrial proletariat is threatening to deprive the NCLC of its once promising working-class base, there, IWP organizers have been subject to ongoing harassment at the hands of NCLCers. Tireless telephone harassment and other "dirty tricks"-including phony phone calls to servicemen "from the IWP" and attempting to brand the IWP a "CIA affiliate" in front of auto workers-have become routine NCLC practice.

Thus witnessing the NCLC abandon the last vestiges of political decency, we are now faced with dismal prospects for encouraging factional struggle within the NCLC as the possibility of our "outside support" is being blocked off. Hence, we must now move toward recruiting NCLC members (especially those of working-class backgrounds, who tend to be the least manipulable), whose ongoing disgust for the NCLC is pushing them towards our perspective-into our growing tendency. However, to those NCLCers who still wish to struggle from within the organization around our "transitional program" or an approximation thereof, we will provide our fullest possible support.

The NCLC has, in fact, swung so far to the right as to make the term "centrist" seem almost inappropriate. In the industrial heartland-where it has traditionally avoided doing serious work with the trade unions and has rather contented itself with impotent "anti-workerist" harangues-it is now waging unprincipled tactics which are disorganizing the working class and creating widespread anti-communist sentiments. In frustration over its failure to organize among the lower-level trade union bureaucracy, the NCLC has launched a terror campaign against union bureaucrats hurling vicious psychological slanders against those bureaucrats and their families who have not heeded the NCLC's wild call to stand up against Nelson "The Fang," Rockefeller.

The Rest of the Left

With the unfortunate rejugglng of the political spectrum flowing from the NCLC's degeneration, the question arises as to the prospects for intervention into the shards of the remaining American Left. The possibility that there are handfuls of reachable cadres in at least the larger of these organizations should not be precluded.

This is not to deny, however, that most of the clown show that now passes for an American Left is absolutely incapable of revolutionary initiative. The "granddaddy" organizations-the CPUSA and SWP-are still churning out their "pop-front" coalitions around whatever lowest-common-denominator issue happens to avail itself-be it "anti-inflation," "Dump Ford," or whatever. Meanwhile, the younger sects-Progressive Labor Party, Revolutionary Union, International Socialists, Spartacist League, etc.-are all systematically doing their own thing (either going "directly to the workers" to trade shop talk and incite suicidal wildcats, or engaging in academic debates over "whether we are headed for a depression"). The actual onset of the depression finds all of these groups at a loss as to how to proceed. Their response to IWP united front agitation around the major issues of working-class survival will be a stern test of their revolutionary capacity-which we expect few of them to pass.

Our struggle against the rest of the Left will be carried into the arena of the struggle for hegemony over the labor movement. We will not content ourselves with the kind of "Left-hegemony" which the CPUSA ceded to the NCLC through the latter's successful united front formation of the National Unemployed and Welfare Rights Organization in the spring of 1973-in the face of the CP's attempted sabotage. For, by fixating on the question of "Left-hegemony" in a country where the minuscule Left is terribly isolated from the working-class, the NCLC irretrievably isolated itself from broader organizational forces and from the working masses, embarking on the sectarian plunge which gave rise to its current state of self-destruction. For all its "Left hegemony," in the crucial auto industry in and around Detroit, the NCLC's institutionalized presence is feebler than that of many smaller Left groups-New Solidarity's chatterings about "briefing networks" and "cross-penetration" notwithstanding.) The CPUSA, meanwhile has its longstanding dormant bureaucrat hacks nesting in the unions-whose importance in a time of mass-strike upsurge must not be underestimated. Hacks of this sort must be ruthlessly out-organized before a major upsurge develops. And this, of course, is only the first step on the road toward wresting hegemony over the labor movement from the entrenched agents of the capitalist class-from Woodcock on down.

Precisely because of the bankruptcy of the organized American Left, there exist scattered but viable Left elements ("independents") throughout the country who still recognize the need for mass organization. The focal point for our consolidation of these elements will be our newspaper, the International Worker. Established on a united front basis, the International Worker will welcome contributions toward an ongoing, pointed discussion of the revolutionary tasks facing socialists in this historical period. Only through the initiation of the most widespread and serious political discussion of the pressing tasks of the day will the now-fragmented and demoralized American Left move toward rallying around a single organization of mass potential.

ENDNOTES

[1]      Ironically, former IWP Central Committee member William Pleasant made similar-albeit, more genuinely Marxist-demands in his 1994 resignation letter to Fred Newman.  Mimicking LaRouche's response to him, Newman summarily ridiculed and rejected Pleasant's stipulations and initiated a massive propaganda campaign against him and others (replete with anonymous faxes and media articles full of cop-baiting slander) in the hopes of tarnishing the political reputations of Pleasant and others.