The following piece was published in the IWP's newspaper after four Workers World Party organizers (later referred to as the "Communist Workers Faction" or Comcad) were invited to join the IWP. All four Comcad were expelled from the IWP within one year, however, and began rallying against the Newmanites after learning the IWP had presented damaging political information about James Retherford to the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office. While the piece is marred by excessive rhetoric, it is nonetheless invaluable in understanding Fred Newman's racist failure to support union organizing, school desegregation and the civil rights movement (quite similar to the Republican Party's position on labor, busing and civil rights).

4 Comrades Expelled from Workers World Party, Join IWP

By Joel Meyers

International Worker, February 1975

Four longstanding former members of Workers World Party (WWP)-better known for its youth group Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF)-have become members of the International Workers Party. The four, combining totally about thirty years of political experience in that organization alone, were expelled several weeks ago after constituting themselves the Class-Unity Faction. The four are Myron Jefka, Elizabeth Kearny, Thomas Ross, and myself, Joel Meyers.

What Attracted Us

We had been attracted to WWP-YAWF on the basis of its unique militancy and anti-imperialism characteristic of the organization during the 60s. The record was in many ways impressive: the first organization to demonstrate against the Vietnam war; the only political party to come to the aid of the Monroe, N.C. defendants, counterposing armed self defense to the nonviolence and call for federal troops predominant in the Civil Rights movement at the time; the only political organization to commit itself to aid unionization of the armed forces (American Servicemen's Union), the only political party at the time to support both China and the Soviet Union against the U.S.; the only political party to seriously encourage draft resistance; the only organization to take to the streets to oppose U.S.-Israeli aggression in the 1967 war; the only political party that gave consistent support to the Black Panther Party when it was under most intense attack by all organs of the state, among many other things.

But by the beginning of the 70s, a new turn in party policy was signaled by the slogan "face to the masses." What was clearly implied, and concretely put into practice under that slogan was a shift in emphasis from the former "vanguard" approach, as it was understood, to more palpable, "realistic," bread-and-butter approach which, it was felt, could "recruit" masses. An artificial bifurcation separated the "revolutionary" from the "popular" in the mind of WW-YAWF. The masses were looked at as hopelessly anticommunist and U.S.-chauvinistic from an alienated vantage point.

Until that point, WWP-YAWF's polemical thrust within the antiwar movement was to condemn the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, the pacifists and the liberals generally as moderating their support for the world revolution in failing to press such slogans as "immediate withdrawal" from Vietnam, and failing to connect the struggle against the U.S. war in Vietnam up with a world revolutionary process, capitulating on this point to mass backwardness in the U.S. What was needed was not just an antiwar movement, but a consciously anti imperialist movement.

Marxian Methodology

As I began to develop my differences, they seemed at first to be completely disjointed, centered around this single issue or that. Gradually, these grew in quantity, and became generalized into a criticism of what appeared to be a reformist trend. Only later-at the time of the preparations for the Boston march, which shall be discussed later on-I came to see the interconnectedness of the deviations of WWP-YAWF, as well as the interconnectedness between the past policies of the organization and the present ones.

Basically, the ideological root of the problem lies in the lack of methodological understanding on the part of WWP-YAWF. Marxist methodology looks at the world as a totality, centering about the production and reproduction of human life, and the means of sustaining it. It recognizes the historic role of the proletariat to be that of overturning all class society, and therewith, the alienated state of humanity from itself and against itself. The material basis for accomplishing that task lies in the constant process of humanity mastering nature, to some degree even before it masters itself, to the point where private property in the means of production no longer provides, a framework in which expanded reproduction can continue; thus at once enabling humanity to socialize the means of production and making this task an imperious necessity for the survival of the human race-indeed, for the creation of a race that is truly human. Only the proletariat, united as the class-for-itself, can complete this mission. The duty of the vanguard party of the proletariat is to organize it as such, as the class-for-itself.

The material basis for developing such consciousness is rooted in that imperious necessity, as the socialist revolution becomes historically visible. However, we still live in a world based on private property and individual competition for the means of survival which gives birth to an empirical, reductionist consciousness, and at the same time constantly corrodes away developing revolutionary consciousness. In fact, methodological awareness in the international communist movement had been largely lost, since the deaths of Marx and Rosa Luxemburg.

Empiricism and reductionism, as counterposed to correct methodology, consist in seeing the world not so much as particularity-in-totality, something in the context of all that it isn't (A/Ā), but as the sum of a number of discrete parts. It is this metaphysic that leads people into racism, nationalism, and so on, as well as class-in-itself consciousness, and to struggle along lines dictated by the immediate interests of such groupings, but losing sight of the historic mission of the proletariat, which is not just against the bosses, but for the abolition of classes, and the creation of a self-conscious humanity-for-itself, presiding finally over a self sustaining reality-for-itself, conscious on account of its mastery by humanity.

At best, such a methodological approach leads to choosing which side of each discrete struggle is the side of the oppressed, and supporting that struggle as is, instead of attempting to change reality by intervening to give leadership from the perspective of the class-for-itself, grounded in expanded reproduction.

Labor Aristocracy

The U.S. workers, by and large having no politically independent mass organization played, at best, a passive role except to the extent that they were mobilized by the capitalists for war and war production to fight against the world proletarian revolution, in which they were a pliant tool. WWP-YAWF accepted the Engels-Lenin theory of the labor aristocracy to explain the compromised antiwar position other working class parties as capitulating to the labor aristocracy, or that portion of the of the working class, mainly in the imperialistic nations, bought off by the bourgeoisie with a "piece of the action"-that is, imperialist affluence and prosperity at the expense of super-exploited colonial peoples. This labor aristocracy, then, becomes the social basis for opportunism in the working class movement.

The immediate material interests of "privileged" workers, with only a slight vulgarization of that theory, become counterposed to the interests of the class as a whole, and the working class in the imperialist countries, crucial to the world revolution, are written off until some indefinite time when indefinite "conditions" will supposedly make possible the task of organizing them on a revolutionary basis.

Intellectually, or more accurately scholastically, the historic role of the technologically advanced proletariat in leading humanity in the destruction of capitalism and the construction of socialism is often stressed, but in hollow lip service. In practice, it is pushed out of the present mind into the indefinite future. At the same time, the working class becomes naively romanticized in the eyes of the petit bourgeois radical movement, or, more pointedly, patronized as it actually is, in deprecation of what it potentially is. This offers an escape from the difficult task of changing reality in this dimension.

The labor aristocracy, then, became the basic explanation of the degeneration of all four working class internationals.

Under "face to the masses," a gradual shift in the work of WWP-YAWF took place in the direction of bread-and-butter issues-artificially bifurcated from more international vanguard issues which supposedly would "turn the workers off." Ironically, this was done on the basis of a prognosis than an economic crisis and a working class upsurge were to develop in the near future. That is, as the working class would become more and more class conscious, more and more closely approximating revolutionary consciousness, it was somehow necessary for the party to make its own demands, slogans, and tactics more and more moderate and scaled down.

Units were initiated as "mass" organizations by WWP-YAWF. In addition to the American Servicemen's Union (ASU), the Center for United Labor Action and Women United for Action were launched. The CULA centered around strike support work, while WUA called for a food price rollback. The discussion of politics in the offices of either unit was strictly prohibited. It was not the heads and hearts of the working class that would be aimed at, but the mouth and the stomach.

In their public stands (neither has concrete written or consistently expressed program). WUA has still to this day not been able to bring itself to a demand to expropriate the food industry under workers control. CULA has been unable even to approach a general analysis of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. Actually, WWP-YAWF as a whole has never had more than an all-or-nothing approach, never practicing the Leninist concept of "critical support."

Meanwhile, the ASU, having been a militant rank-and-file active duty GI organization-which objectively aimed at destroying the effectiveness of the U.S. military as a tool of the capitalist class-was largely transformed into a veterans action group which would seek to get more benefits for veterans, and party members participating in such drives were instructed not to "come off as antiwar types" but to respect the fact that many of these veterans were "Third World" and got their first opportunity to rise from the gutter with the war. With such a contemptuous outlook, it catered to alleged backwardness, which often was not there at first. At various veterans' coalition meetings, the ASU refused to support antiwar resolutions offered by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).

In order to justify the continuation of such backwardness, Sam Marcy-Chairman of WWP-YAWF-projected at WWP's 1974 Labor Day Convention that, yes, a working class upsurge is coming, but it will be on an "elementary level, although wholly progressive." It will not aim at overthrowing the system, he continued. These forecasts represent a totally defeatist outlook, and alienation from the very concept of proletarian leadership. Such a prediction also amounts to the doom of civilization-unless Third World revolutions take on and fulfill all the responsibilities of the world proletariat!

Unable to face that prospect from such a pessimistic forecast, the leadership began to push the idea of the "inevitability" of socialism in a completely fatalistic way, and strongly picked on Myron who had taught the concept, "either socialism or barbarism," in his class on historical materialism. The leadership admits that, theoretically, it is true that barbarism is indeed a possibility, but that it is demoralizing to raise it. Translation: we have no material confidence that the proletariat will accomplish the socialist transformation of society, and therefore are demoralized at the very suggestion of such a grim alternative. Turning the situation around, the WWP leadership called Myron a pessimist, in that he had no faith that capitalism would preserve the prerequisites of the socialist revolution until whenever it happened.

Generally, we saw the dynamic of the party as developing in a reformist direction, but, admittedly, from an ultra-leftist viewpoint that reflected the prior orientation of WWP-YAWF. We saw the new direction as a sellout to the pressure of the labor aristocracy which-while a tiny portion of the world working class-could still be a major portion, or even the virtual entirety, of the U.S. working class as compared with that of the rest of the capitalist world. We saw the purely bread-and-butter politics of militant trade unionism in the absence of anti imperialism generally-in the absence of any serious attempt to bring revolutionary ideology to the workers-as a haggle between workers and bosses over the size of the social bribe, in the context of a partnership to exploit the rest of the world. We looked at the U.S. working class as in a middle position among strata of the world population, between the real have-nots and haves.

Of course, in WWP-YAWF we were making a point about its former practice, which, while embodying some of the most moralistic positions, alienated these issues from the immediate needs and consciousness of the U.S. working class. It is only now, free of the WWP-YAWF environment, that we can see how the prior history of that organization is only the other side of the coin of its present history. Neither position-former or present-attempts to organize workers on a revolutionary basis, to develop the class-for-itself. In the first instance, the demands and slogans looked truly class-wide and internationalist. But they were only moralistically so. The organization, in demanding, say, 'Bring the troops home now," was merely posturing historically, emptily ranting at reality. To change that reality, a party of the proletariat needs a concrete program to link up the struggle to meet everyday needs of human survival, the threat to which is now becoming extremely acute, to the struggle to overthrow the capitalist state and construct socialism-which merge in the process of the struggle for expanded reproduction.

Boston Busing Position

The situation around the Boston events brought this point home to us. Here WWP-YAWF worked with might and main, abandoning almost everything else, to build the Emergency Committee Against Racism in Boston (ECARB). It did so in league with such black politicians as William Owens of Boston, and white butchers such as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Although it subordinated itself completely to the bourgeois "anti racists," merely doing the Committee's leg work, Workers World newspaper never exposed these bourgeois politicals for the ruling-class agents that they are. In fact, it so buried itself in the coalition, that to this day, many leftists still think that the Socialist Workers Party, which strove to give that impression, was really behind it. In their fierce rivalry, the two Trotskyist-gone-reformist groups cooperated objectively to produce that effect.

It was stressed, again and again, that the whole thing was to be done in the spirit of an old fashioned pacifist civil rights demonstration. Ten years ago, in its more militant days, WWP-YAWF had counterposed to such politics the approach of armed self-defense. Marcy now explained that the important thing was for the demonstration not to get "too radical." If it did, he warned, that might scare away the participation of the "real leaders" of the civil rights movement, the bourgeois black politicians and the liberals, who were "far from radical" and who could "bring out the masses."

The greatest danger, he continued, was that the SWP or the CP might try to take the demonstration over. This was not a mere factional question, he explained. Failing to take the demonstration over, they may "spoil" it by injecting an "irresponsible" note. The liberals, on the other hand were no problem, except in that, like the SWP and CP, they might call for troops to Boston, with which "we [WWP] don't agree. But if such a demand is raised by the black community, represented in this case by the NAACP, we would not oppose it so strongly." On the December 14 March Against Racism-which was built by the ECARB-Claudette Furlonge, speaking for WUA, was the only speaker not to, at least demagogically, attack capitalism as responsible for the racism and the school crisis.

Class Unity Faction

From the beginning, we four launched a polemic within WWP on the popular-front and moralizing basis on which the march was being organized; that it made no attempt to raise the question of the expansion of the school system, and link it up with the general decay of life under capitalism from a socialist perspective. We also criticized the general manner in which the busing issue was used by the ruling class to bring about a near civil war atmosphere in Boston, to which-in deference to "self-determination for the black community in Boston"-WP-YAWF had no comment on, forsaking its proclaimed responsibility to lead the whole class.

On the question of racist attacks, we called for the establishment of defense guards, or at least a serious attempt to organize them, so that the hardcore violent racists could be taught a lesson, preferably by whites so that they could not organize a racist hysteria around the issue so easily. That is the only serious way to deal with that question. Still, within WWP-YAWF, we supported the march, but critically. To the public, we supported it uncritically, while we prepared an internal discussion bulletin to constitute ourselves, on the basis of it, the Class Unity Faction of WWP.

In the document, which will be published in the upcoming first issue of Critical Practice, we addressed ourselves to not only the question of the Boston march, but the history of WWP that led up to it, and showed a certain methodological bankruptcy on the part of WWP. This lack of methodological understanding at once explains why WWP policy is made from day-to-day on the basis of a formalistic interpretation of "Marxism-Leninism" so that the party failed to locate itself in the socialist perspective of expanded reproduction and the class-for-itself, and failed to ground itself properly to understand-let alone intervene seriously in-he historic class struggle. Lacking such a methodological perspective, it is susceptible to manipulation by the cunning bourgeois state, and in a practical sense, approaches complex reality in bewilderment. Even naively assuming the absence of state manipulation, an organization that sets out on the stormy sea of revolutionary politics will be battered by random winds from pillar to post, if it lacks the methodological anchor.

Initially, when WWP-hen a faction of the SWP-raised its differences, it raised no methodological differences. It differed at first, when the SWP became derailed at the end of World War II by expecting an imminent world revolution. The not-et Workers World faction felt that that was idiotic optimism and that the conjuncture was one of imperialist regroupment and consolidation. This was a better, although somewhat still alienated, view of reality. But it was not methodologically grounded, and therefore not stable.

By 1959, when WWP emerged as a party it still had a good empirical approximation of reality, and saw the upswing in struggle that was going to come in the next few years on a world scale, and had the guts to take the safety risks involved in expressing support for this. Thus, its "firsts and onlies"-mentioned at the beginning of this article. But guts without a correct methodological insight and location, led to its self-conception as "supporting" revolutions, not being integrated with a revolutionary process, not leading the working class through its class-for-itself building process.

In the petit-bourgeois milieu of the radicals of the 60s, WWP-YAWF soon became lost in trailing after various constituencies which were "easier" to work with than were the still backward workers, who needed it more, and who alone could contribute leadership in the survival struggle of humanity. "The workers aren't moving," the alienated party leadership would explain.

During the 60s, WWP chased after the ultra-left student and black nationalist milieu. When at the close of the 60s that milieu had been crushed by the state, WWP began to chase after a more conservative constituency, "the workers," who were ideologically more conservative, U.S. chauvinistic, and so on. This it did, again, always in a supportive way, reinforcing both what was correct and incorrect in the practice of whomever it was tailing. Instead of polemicizing against the incompetent and irresponsible leadership of these milieus, WWP would try to recruit the leaders-such as Mark Rudd-hoping that, like sheep, all his followers would thereby be won over. Any polemic on Rudd, say, might turn Rudd off, thus making that impossible.

Having been frustrated at its failure to build a mass influence out of the ferment of the 60s, WWP by the beginning of the 70s was ready to try something new. Because the working class did not come running to it on the basis of its oh-so revolutionary slogans, WWP concluded that, by and large, except for Third World workers, workers were incapable of revolutionary politics, and was ready to go the route of economism-reformism.

WWP overestimated the upswing of the 60s largely as a result of its failure to intervene in such a way that the working class would have moved. Its overestimation, otherwise, might not have been an overestimation. It is now stampeding full-speed ahead into underestimating the vital importance of organizing the proletariat, on a revolutionary basis now. It continues to throw the burden of this mobilization on Third World workers, in the name of self-determination, and to propitiate backward white workers in their bread-and-butter demands while ineffectually yelling "racist" at them when they express their other side. Instead of relying on itself to lead the proletariat, in fact, its plummeting self and class confidence has recently led it to court the Stalinist CP's leaderships internationally, at first, the Cubans and North Koreans. Now they have gone so far as to endorse the Portuguese CP's call for government restriction against anyone else forming unions there. It goes without saying that it is shedding whatever vestige of Trotsky's contributions it must in order to reach out to its constituency.

Upon our distribution of our document-provoked by the Boston events-we were summarily expelled from WWP without any concession to democracy in the form of inner-party discussion. "We don't argue with a pack of racists!" we were told as the leadership covered up its own bankruptcy in that invective. By that precedent, WWP-YAWF has sealed its fate as a hopelessly derailed, floundering group which cannot listen, let alone learn from its own comrades who had proven their loyalty in many years of struggle.

International Workers Party

In sharp contrast to the Stalinist structure of WWP, the International Workers Party has shown itself to be unique in its constant process of learning. It is not paranoiacally antidemocratic. It has self-confidence-which grows out of its thorough methodological approach to the world revolution. This expertise, and this spirit that flows from it, gives it alone the potential of developing the leadership that the proletariat, and the survival of humanity, is crying out for.

That democracy is important not merely for its own sake. It is because of it that the IWP was able to assimilate many correctives which we have brought to the IWP, in raising the IWP's level of sensitivity to fascism from below and its influence among the workers, which we must combat. In that way, all the contributions made by WWP, especially those of V. Grey and Sam Marcy, will become assimilated generally as the collective weapon of the proletariat. In expelling us, WWP expelled many of those contributions as well.

PROFILES

Myron Jefka, who joined Workers World late in 1964, was a member for three years of the New York City Committee of WWP. In addition, he had been Educational Director of the organization, and served for almost five years on the Educational Steering Committee. As an organizer in Brooklyn College, he was arrested in 1968 during a demonstration for open admissions along with 39 others. Being the only one to plead "not guilty" to charges of criminal trespassing, he was convicted and forced to spend two violent weeks in Riker's Island Prison. Myron also led the YAWF delegation to the protest against the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party Convention in 1967 and played a leading role in the detachment that YAWF sent to the court martial of Private Andy Stapp-in a struggle that led to the formation of the American Servicemen's Union (ASU).

Joel Meyers, now 31 years old, joined Workers World in 1963. At that time WW-YAWF was the only organization demonstrating against the war. He soon became active in the Monroe Defense Committee, which was formed to defend a group of organizers who introduced the concept of self-defense-armed if need be-for the black community and the civil rights movement. Until that time, the civil rights movement had been totally under nonviolent discipline; that is, believed in announcing beforehand that it would not defend itself even if physically attacked. Later he moved to become a leading YAWF organizer in Buffalo, and was a familiar figure on campus and off in the antiwar movement. In Buffalo he made contact with Martin Sostre, a Haitian-Puerto Rican ex-prisoner who had set up a bookstore on Jefferson Avenue, the aorta of Buffalo's black ghetto. Sostre worked at Bethlehem Steel during the day, and operated his bookstore-full of literature about working class and Third World liberation struggles. When Martin Sostre was arrested in the summer of 1967 (on charges, first of having led the black rebellion in Buffalo, then, later, on preposterous charges of selling dope, for which he was to be railroaded on a 40-year sentence) Joel attended the founding meeting of the Martin Sostre Defense Committee, and wrote its first leaflet. After arriving home at four in the morning that night, Joel was awakened at five by the FBI who had just broken down his door to arrest him on trumped up charges of draft refusal, forcing him to return to New York to fight his case, a process which took more than two years. During that period Joel became a member of the working committee of the NY Anti Draft Coalition, which organized a week full of mammoth demonstrations to 'Close Down the Draft" at the induction center at Whitehall Street and was active in developing the movement's street or "mobile" tactics. In addition he was a frequent contributor to Workers World newspaper and The Partisan, the magazine of YAWF. Already convicted of "failing to report for induction," Joel ran out of legal maneuvers in November of 1969 and was forced to surrender himself to start serving a three and one half year sentence, of which he did some 31 months, mostly at the U.S. penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa. He had been active in prison organizing for which he made a number of trips to solitary confinement, the last of which was to be for approximately six months at the end of his sentence. This punishment was for having been elected to the committee chosen by the Lewisburg prisoners to represent their demands in a nearly 100 percent effective strike. Upon release from prison, he immediately resumed activity in WWP as a member of its National Field Staff, the writing staff of Workers World newspaper, a leading activist in a number of defense committee, and a frequent spokesman for the Prisoners Solidarity Committee.

Elizabeth Kearny had been in Work World Party for three years, and was prominent in the activities of the Center for United Labor Action. Some of the struggles she played a significant role in are: the Raysbestos-Manhattan struggle, wherein a runaway plant was trying, eventually unsuccessfully, to "go South" along with the workers' pension fund to which the workers had contributed all their working lives; the Nathan's struggle to save the jobs of 10 food service workers, nine of them shop stewards, whom Nathan's fired for organizing; the fight against PATH lines-the subway connecting New York and New Jersey-which was seeking to raise its fare to 50 cents, an attempt that was temporarily defeated; and the struggle of the New Jersey cemetery workers against the Church over union recognition and working conditions. In addition she was a frequent writer for United Labor Action, the newspaper of CULA, and was a contributing editor of the CULA pamphlet, "Working Women, Our Stories and Our Struggles." In addition to her work with CULA, she was perhaps the most active member of Workers' World's activities committee, taking responsibility for demonstrations, forums, socials, relations with other organizations and coalitions. She also took on responsibility on a regular basis for distributing Workers World newspaper.

Thomas Ross was a worker and rank and file member of WWP. He was active as an at-work organizer for the CULA and was an organizer of defense training and participation.