Coalition Politics and the Rise of the CIO

What coalition politics is

Last time we were talking about Reconstruction and the Populist movement, and in these movements we saw an attempt to solve certain problems that people had run up against in this country: the attempt by the Negro people to win their democratic rights after the Civil War, and, in the Populist movement, the attempt of the small farmers to stop the historic process of monopoly capitalism driving them off the land. In both cases we saw that they attempted to achieve this within the context of support of one section of the ruling class or another. In both cases they failed. Now I want to discuss coalition politics as it relates to the development of the CIO and to the present situation we're facing in the United States. But before we do that, as I promised you last time, I want to begin by going over just what coalition politics is. It is very confused. Most students today in the antiwar movement believe coalition politics means whether you work in the Democratic Party or not. It doesn't mean that. That's only one way in which coalition politics expresses itself.

Let me go way back to the very foundations of where the differences come from between those who support coalition politics and those who oppose it. The essence is the question of whether you believe that changes in the society can be brought about by reforming the present system or by overthrowing it. In the last analysis, this is the difference. Now let me tell you why. Let's assume that you believe a basic problem, such as the war in Vietnam, or democratic rights for the Negro people, can be solved within the system through reforming it. This can only mean that a section of the ruling class, or the ruling class as a whole, will accept the solving of this problem, that it's not fundamentally against its class interests. Therefore, within the fight to reform the system, one can and should seek to find that section of the ruling class, or that approach to the ruling class, which can make it accept the change you want. It would be foolhardy to throw yourself against the whole system if the basic changes you want can be achieved within it. And therefore anyone who is a reformist [?], or who believes that the necessary changes can be achieved through reforms, should attempt coalition politics, and we strongly encourage them to, if they strongly believe this. Because coalition politics is not a question of running elections or anything. It is the attempt to base your politics on the idea that a section of the ruling class, or the ruling class as a whole, can be won over to the program you are fighting for.

Now, let us say you don't believe that's possible. Let us say you believe only a revolution can change the problem. This means you believe that the class in power, the ruling class, is irreconcilably opposed to solving the problem. In fact, in most cases, historically, you would say that the class is the cause of the problem and therefore cannot remove it. It would be absolute insanity to base yourself on trying to find a friendly section, or to win this class over to your program, which is its destruction. Therefore, if your perspective on ending the war, or on solving any of the basic problems that mankind faces, living in the United States in 1966 under capitalism, is that the system can be reformed, then the logical conclusion is to engage in coalition politics. That is, to seek an alliance to win a section of the ruling class to your program, to back that section, and to mobilize pressure for backing it.

The Democratic Party and the myth of the man

The question of the Democratic Party has tended to be confused with the question of coalition politics because, since the defeat of the Populists in 1896, as I pointed out, the capitalists in the United States developed a myth, a whole basis of approach to developing movements, on the theory of what they call the two-party system. It is taught to you from the time you can go to school that the two-party system is sort of God-ordained, it's great, it works wonderfully. From the capitalist point of view, they're just expressing through the school system their own thinking. In no other capitalist nation do they have such control over the political life, and it's been the achievement of this two-party system, and precisely of the Democratic Party since its development after it defeated Reconstruction and defeated the Populists. With those two achievements under its belt, the Democratic Party was the vehicle best fitted for containing and blocking and destroying any motion toward independent political action on the basis of oppressed people in the country.

And by independent political action, I do not mean just running candidates. I mean organizing independently, talking about running the government, talking about being the rulers, talking about changing the society with your own hands. That's independent political action. The antiwar committees that exist today are independent political action, though they don't run candidates, because they're independent from the power structure and they're seeking to solve the problem as against the power structure, not by trying to find a section of it. Not the whole antiwar movement, of course. I'm talking about the independent committees like the VDCs. Most of the antiwar movement, or the people who would be included in it, most layers of it, are for coalition politics, either consciously or unconsciously. I'll discuss that later.

There's another aspect to it. The bourgeoisie in this country, in electoral candidates and in politics in general, has raised the concept, and it stems right out of the development of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism itself, that you've got to look toward individuals. The movement or the people themselves never make changes. They find a leader who can express what they want. They find an individual who's capable. That's taught to you from when you were a kid. You go to vote for candidates, and what are you taught? Look for the man. They never say to you, you ought to look for what movement represents what you're for, or what class in society. You're always taught to look for the man. And this tremendous myth is built up and continuously perpetrated. For instance, take the myth that LBJ makes decisions. Every president, no matter who he is, the minute he's elected, the myth machine goes to work to make the impression that he really is the decision-maker and that he is a very superhuman type. No matter which one wins, the ruling class as a whole does this. And the politics of the society is permeated with that.

So if someone runs independently on an electoral ticket, as an individual, we judge them first of all on their program. What do they say? What is it they want to achieve, and how do they want to achieve it? You can be completely independent of the Democratic Party and be engaging in coalition politics. Completely and entirely. Your whole purpose could be that the Democratic and Republican parties are not doing the right type of job to win over the ruling class. That is, by the way, formally the position of SDS. As I will show a little later, I'll give you a quote from them, in which they actually say in so many words that what you've got to do is get outside the Democratic and Republican parties, be independent of them, in order to be able to influence the ruling class by putting the right type of pressure on it.

The essence of independent political action is to drive a wedge between the oppressed and the oppressor, to put one against the other. In classical Marxist terms, it's the question of class collaboration versus class struggle. The essence of coalition politics is to seek some sort of class collaboration as a means to solve a problem, and the essence of independent political action is to seek class struggle as a means to solve a problem. In the political arena, in the context in which we're living today, the number one question before the working class of America is its break from the Democratic Party and from its political organizations. And therefore the whole question tends to cycle around the Democratic Party. But it's a much deeper question, and it's revealed in the actions that the antiwar committees, that every organization, whether civil rights or anything, take in their day-to-day lives. They're either engaging in coalition politics or they're intensifying the class struggle to one degree or another, sometimes contradictorily, but that in itself is coalition politics or independent political action. It's not just a question of running candidates.

The CIO as a victory of the working class

Now, let's go to the CIO and its rise. When we discussed Reconstruction and the Populists, we noted that Reconstruction was based on the rural proletariat of the freed slaves and the Populists on the small farm owner. The CIO was qualitatively different. The CIO based itself on the revolutionary class that can change society, the working class. It is not a class that's dying. It's a class that's growing. It's not a class that's peripheral to the function of capitalism. It's the class that's fundamental to it, which cannot exist without it. Every deeper development of capitalism, every bigger factory, every more intense colonization and expansion of capitalism only intensifies and strengthens this class. It is the class that can take on capitalism. And therefore its moving, as it did when the CIO was built, was a prelude, an opening shot in the war between the classes that must be decisive in this country, between the two classes that really face each other.

It wasn't the first battle the working class in the United States had entered into, but it was a qualitatively new phenomenon, because it drew into it millions upon millions of workers. It drew into it the mass layers of the working class in the key industries of the country and brought about industrial unions, the first real mass organizations of that type of the working class. And the CIO and the rise of trade unions in this country is not understood by the antiwar movement, by the student radical, and sometimes even misunderstood by YSAers. You've got to remember that what Marx said about class struggle happens to be true: that the ruling class and the working class face each other in continuous and irreconcilable struggle, and that the relationship between the two, in the last analysis, comes down to brute force.

The state apparatus of the capitalist class, with all the weakness it has, is dependent on the working class to be able to rule. Every victory the working class makes against it is weakening it. Think about this. Could the United States Army today be ordered to fire dead on into a United Auto Workers strike? Very unlikely. Very unlikely that the army would be capable, and if it did it once, it would be odd if it could do it more than a couple of times at best. Because of the consciousness of the mass of the American people, the victories that have been won, the right to have a union, the right to strike, these permeate the mass of the exploited, and the ruling class cannot easily destroy that. Just because they happen to have control over the officer caste [?] and the soldiers and so forth doesn't mean that they are all-powerful, as the student tends to think, because he doesn't understand the relationship between classes. The victory of the CIO and the trade unions is like our first line of defense against reaction.

It is what prevents the capitalist class from doing many, many other things. And it is only because of the reactionary leadership of the unions that the capitalists can do a lot of what they do. The CIO is a power, and the unions today are a power in this country that is unparalleled in the working-class movements of the world, and we should understand that that victory cannot just be taken away. To try to destroy the unions would be a mammoth battle, one which the capitalist class trembles at the thought of ever having to take on. All the reactionary moods and reactionary attitudes of workers and all the bourgeois ideology nevertheless do not cut across that fundamental gain that's been won with the rise of the CIO. It is weakened. They're always chipping away, knocking this union a little bit and that union. They might even destroy a union here or there. But that general rise, that social movement which rose up in 1936 and 1937, which created the CIO and the trade union movement as we know it today, is a formidable victory for the class, which puts it in a much better position for the next battle and makes it much harder for the capitalists to rule over us. That's got to be understood, because we can't see the context of what's going to happen in America, or understand the past history and what's developing, without really understanding what the trade union movement is.

Why there was no labor party

I say all that in the positive before I begin to discuss what happened in the political arena, so that I don't mislead in any way. Right from the start, right from the time the CIO rose, it had one arm tied behind its back, and that was its political arm. It fought the boss, the direct one, the owner of the factory or the corporation that owned the factory. It did not fight the bosses politically. It did not challenge them on who's going to govern. And by not doing so, the capitalists continuously had the advantage of not having any challenge whatsoever on the political scene and the governmental level, and were able to come down and fight the CIO with both arms while the CIO was tied by one.

The question becomes why. This is very important because, like I said, this is not now just a question of history, though history is very valuable. In fact, it's crucial to understand it when we talk about Reconstruction or the Populist movement, much to be learned from them. But the battle we're talking about now is still on. It's not over. It's still on, and we're going to face, our whole life, this question that confronted the CIO and the defeats it took because it did not create a labor party, because it did not form its political arm. So we really have to understand this well, and understand why it didn't come about, what was the cause of it, so that we do not let it happen again at the next opportunity.

The key to the question, of course, is the question of leadership. The AFL trade union bureaucracy, of which the leadership of the CIO was a split-off, started the CIO and, right from the start, engaged the CIO in politics. One of the things that differentiated the CIO from the AFL right at the beginning wasn't just that they carried out militant strikes or that they were organizing industrial unions, though these things did characterize them differently. One thing that characterized them right from the start was that they organized themselves for political struggle. What they organized themselves to do was to win over Roosevelt and the section of the ruling class he represented to side with them in their faction fights with the AFL, and to try to create a coalition where the trade union bureaucrats would have it easier and would be able to solve some of the problems by negotiating with this section of the ruling class. They formed trade union political organizations for the purpose of supporting good Democrats. They formed a Labor Party in New York for the purpose of supporting Democrats.

Don't let that shock you. A labor party can be formed for the purpose of coalition politics. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's good. The formation of a labor party depends on how the workers understand it and what an opposition leadership can make of it. We worked within the Labor Party, the Minnesota Labor Party and others, in trying to give them a class-against-class line, to make them real organs of the working class. But as a whole, what they did was engage in straight-out coalition politics by using the unions and keeping them tied to Roosevelt, to the so-called liberal capitalists, to the Democratic Party.

Now, you might ask, but were the workers opposed to this? Weren't they for it? Was it really possible to do anything else? The truth is that even to this day, if the leadership of the unions moved for the formation of a trade union party, a party based on the trade unions, a labor party, they would have with them the overwhelming majority of the workers. The workers are not opposed to the formation of a labor party. It's that they don't think it's realistic, because they can't get their own unions to move on it. But in 1936 and '37, and again in 1943, and again in 1945 and 1946, the ranks pushed for a labor party. When the United Auto Workers was founded, at their founding convention they voted unanimously for the formation of a labor party. In Michigan, during the mid-'40s, they had continuous uprisings in the ranks of the trade unions demanding a labor party. In the end they finally got a semi-formation that then dissolved in a short period. The United Auto Workers have been in the lead on this question, year after year, passing resolutions and making demands. In the late '40s they invited a professor to come to speak at a convention, and this professor got up, I think it was '47, and made a long talk, and his whole point was how the labor movement was just tying its hands behind its back by not having a labor party. By the time he got through speaking he got a monstrous standing ovation from all the delegates. There you saw that if someone would just stand up and fight for it, the ranks would be for it.

The thing with workers, of course, as with any working class, and it's the same in this country, is that they don't just stick their own necks out. They have the instinct, from the way they live, of understanding that you've got to move as a whole, and if they don't see the trade union doing it, then they don't think it's realistic. The opportunities for a labor party [?] have existed all along. So what we have to examine is what leadership prevented the formation of a labor party. First and foremost, in essence, it was the trade union bureaucracy. That is, a formation within the trade unions that has special privileges, that sees as its fundamental task to maintain those privileges, and therefore seeks to coexist with the capitalists within the capitalist world in order to maintain them.

The Communist Party and the lost opportunity

But we also have to diagnose the trade union bureaucracy in terms of what tendencies it represented. Who made up the trade union bureaucracy? And most certainly we have the question, what was the socialist movement doing? Because one would, of course, expect the socialist movement, by definition, to mean those conscious workers who are for class struggle and for the betterment of the working class. And don't ever believe that is the definition anymore for people who call themselves socialists, because chances are when a person comes around and puts the label socialist or even communist on himself, you're not talking to a socialist or a communist. And as all of you know, this was most certainly true in the 1930s and '40s.

What made it possible to block the formation of a labor party, in the last analysis, in the sense of the struggle that could have been led, was the fact that the socialist movement was dominated by a reformist tendency, a tendency that sought not to solve the problems of the American workers through revolution. In fact it didn't even seek to solve the problems of the American workers. It was the Communist Party, which based itself on trying to create an alliance with one or another section of the capitalist class in support of whatever policies were in the best interest, as they saw them, of the Soviet bureaucracy in Russia. That's a pretty out-and-out, flat statement. But that's the essence of the matter: that the Communist parties after 1928 rapidly developed in the degeneration and the rise of Stalinism in Russia, so that what motivated their actions, no matter whether they were on a right swing or a left swing or whatever it was, was the attempt of the Soviet bureaucracy, just like a trade union bureaucracy, to coexist with capitalism by finding some capitalists they can work with. They wanted to coexist on a world scale with capitalism by finding one section of the capitalists who they could exist with. Whether it was French capitalism or American capitalism, or a section of the French capitalists or a section of the American capitalists, this was their one and only concern. So when the trade union movement rose, their line as to what the trade union movement should do politically simply depended upon the direction in which the Soviet bureaucracy wanted them to go.

I think it is very important that we all realize now, in 1966, what this meant. A tremendous historic opportunity was lost. The Communist Party reached control of as much as one-third of the CIO. They were numerically in a position to fight for a labor party and probably win. If we were in a similar position, there would be no question that we would have had a labor party, if not something much better than that, a mass revolutionary party. That defeat left the American working class tied down and handicapped in such a way that all the defeats we have met since then, like the witch hunt, the Korean War, and today the Vietnam War, are a hundred times harder to fight back against, because we don't have a political formation like a labor party. Regardless of who would have led it or how it would have been led, such a formation would have opened up avenues of struggle a hundred times better than what we have today. The Communist Party did everything it could, and it was sufficient. Communist parties proved sufficient to stop the formation of a labor party.

You've got to understand that Stalinism, the Communist Party, knows no limits to what it will do. No limits. You try to guess a limit. Just guess it. Will they try to break a strike? Of course they'll try to break strikes. Will they lie about revolutionaries? Of course they'll lie about revolutionaries. Where's the limit? Well, fortunately, mankind has achieved the ability to write. Therefore the Holy CP would like to burn a lot of the things they have written. In fact, they usually like to burn anything that was written over a year old. We have certain copies of their material which they cannot now make disappear. So I want to document to you some of the things the Communist Party stood for, so that you see this in real life. And I want to do it in the context of the most difficult period for American labor, when the United States went into an imperialist war, when the United States ruling class, in its struggle against other capitalist classes, went out to conquer the markets of Asia and of Latin America and of Europe, and in order to do this had to whip everybody into line and start trying to inch out the trade union movement and smash it in any way they could, to hold down the wages of the workers. All the propaganda machine, all the weight of capitalism, all the chauvinism and patriotism and everything they can whip up, all the backwardness in the masses, all the racism, everything was at work. When the class most needs leadership, that's when I want to talk about what the Communist Party did.

The Communist Party in the Second World War

Now, I have a book, and I want to quote to you what Virgil Jordan, president of the National Industrial Conference Board, speaking to the convention of the Investment Bankers Association, said. What you're getting here is man-to-man talk among the capitalists as to what the war is all about.

Whatever the outcome of the war, America has embarked upon a career of imperialism, both in world affairs and in every other aspect of her life. Even though, by our aid, England should emerge from this struggle without defeat, she will be so impoverished economically and crippled in prestige that it is improbable that she will be able to resume or maintain the dominant position in world affairs which she has occupied so long. At best, England will become a junior partner in an Anglo-Saxon imperialism, in which the economic resources and the military and naval strength of the United States will be the center of gravity. Southward in our hemisphere and westward in the Pacific, the path of the empire takes its way, and in modern terms of economic power as well as political prestige, the, how do you pronounce it, scepter? Scepter. Passes to the United States. All this is what lies beneath the phrase "national defense." Some of it deeply hidden, some of it very near the surface, and soon to emerge to challenge us.

That was the Second World War. Now the CP, led by an extremely intelligent man, Earl Browder, who never really knew how he came in or how he went out, but he did both very dramatically, wrote up and explained what the Second World War was. Let me now clarify your minds on this question. What was the nature of the war? The class nature, the character of the war, is a people's war of national liberation. We're talking about China, we're talking about the United States: we had a war of national liberation.

That was the nature of the war. Now, who will lead this war for our national liberation? One would assume it's the Communist Party in support of a bloc of four classes [?] or something? No. "As spokesman for the Communist Party, I declare that we subordinate every issue to this one imperative necessity of national unity under the nation's commander-in-chief to win the war." Let me just let you in on history: the commander-in-chief, he means Roosevelt, president of American imperialism. Is he the only possible leader this country could have in this war of national liberation? "Roosevelt is our national commander-in-chief, and victory is possible only by upholding his hands and defeating the obstructionists and fifth columnists who are his domestic enemies."

Now, who is the domestic enemy of the capitalist class? The working class. And what they mean is that the working class is going to pay for this war, is going to do the fighting, is going to do the dying for Roosevelt. You think I'm exaggerating? Who will pay for this war? "An attempt to interpret literally the phrase 'equality of sacrifice' would, of course, not help prosecute the war to victory, but would hopelessly sabotage it. There is not and cannot be any literal equality of sacrifice as between workers and capitalists in this war. The workers must make the main sacrifices, and they have enough common sense to know it." Now, what do you do if a worker objects? Doesn't quite agree? "We were vilified as murderers because we explained and justified the Soviet Union's purges of the fifth column traitors, the Trotskyites and the Bukharinites, who had entered the service of Hitler and the Mikado. Who dares to raise this issue against the American Communist Party today?"

But one may say, aren't you communists? Aren't communists supposed to, you know, what the Manifesto says, the fear of the ruling class, the specter of communism? "To all those who are still haunted by the specter of communism, we offer the services of the Communist Party itself to lay this ghost." Now what about colonialism? Aren't we an imperialist nation that engages in colonialism? "Thus, in Cuba, the Communist Party of that country, fused with another party of the left in the Unión Revolucionaria Comunista, is an important sector of the Democratic coalition which elected Fulgencio Batista to the presidency of that country. There is still much to be done, mind you," this is the Communist Party, "there is still much to be done to dissipate the fear and suspicion of Yankee imperialism in order to create confidence throughout Latin America in the role of the United States as a leader of the United Nations."

Anything else you need to know about the role of the Communist Party? The Communist Party said, in effect, to the ruling class of this country: we are here. We have penetrated the working class. We have our roots in the trade union movement, and we are at your service. Because the Soviet Union is under attack from the enemies of the American bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie that happens to have sided the other way around, we don't care anything about the working class. All we're interested in is what the bureaucracy happens to want at the moment. This is what they want.

You would say, well, that's the way they were all along, they're just a reformist party. No, no, no, they switched their line. One of the problems Browder had in writing this book was that he had to explain another book he wrote called The Way Out. The Way Out was written while Browder had to explain the Hitler-Stalin pact, in which the Communist Party in this country was left-wing, was opposed to war. They're not opposed to war today. They were opposed to war during the Hitler-Stalin pact because, you're not going to believe this, but let me get this. First let me tell you this so you can have a good laugh. When he had to explain why they had opposed the war and how they had opposed Roosevelt (they actually called Roosevelt a fascist, which is wrong also; everything they do is basically wrong because it stems from a wrong conception, so everything they do is politically wrong), the way they explained it during the war was this. It's just fantastic when you think about it. They say the reason we opposed the United States going into the war in 1938 and 1939 was that we were so patriotic we realized, the Communist Party realized, that if the United States went to war against Germany by itself, without the aid of the Soviet Union, it would have a very difficult war. While if we waited until the Soviet Union got in there, then as patriotic Americans we move in and give them the punch while the Germans are rolling, and it's a real easy war for the United States and we can win. You see how patriotic we were? We were waiting for the Soviet Union to move so that we, all along, were really for the United States.

Here is what they said at the time. "The ruling classes of each warring camp reply, yes, we all want peace, but peace can come only through the victory of our side. Therefore the only road to peace is to sacrifice everything for the war. Thus the agents of finance and war profiteers try to turn the very aspirations for peace into the mightiest engine for war." The Communist Party is warning everybody. "Not the victory of one or another imperialist camp is the road to peace, but the victory of the people over their war-making rulers in each country is the only way. What reason is there to believe that an Allied victory will bring anything better to the world than a German victory?" There they were, saying it made no difference in the world whether there was a German victory or an Allied victory. Fundamentally a lot of these phrases are correct in terms of class politics. But notice that all of a sudden, the next day, oh, of course, the whole class nature of the war changed. How did the war change? Did the classes turn around? Capitalists start working and workers start becoming capitalists? What happened? How did the whole class nature of this war change? Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The Soviet bureaucracy therefore wanted now an alliance, not with Germany, but against Germany. Is the policy basically different? By the way, they made all types of statements, like Roosevelt is just like Hitler, there's no difference.

Now listen to this real carefully, and you'll see the coalition politics come through here, the way they continuously seek, their whole question is getting an alliance with the ruling class. This is in their left period. This is when they're real revolutionaries. Here's what he writes. He's talking about the development of the imperialists all over the world and what's happening. He comes around to the United States and he says: "The most reactionary section went in the Hitler direction, while a liberal section rallied the masses to its support for a liberal experiment in progressive domestic and foreign policy to meet the crisis. This came to be identified as the New Deal and the Good Neighbor policies. Both of these are now dead. The Rooseveltism of the New Deal has capitulated to the reactionaries."

Do you see the line? It's whether the ruling class is carrying out the line they want or the line they don't want. In other words, Roosevelt, before he capitulated to the reactionaries, was really a good guy, but now he's capitulating. Not a class line, not a question of one class against another. It's what the capitalist class are doing. They're always looking to the capitalist class for their solutions, even when they're talking as militant as hell and sounding real revolutionary. The essence of the line comes through: which way is the ruling class going, this way or that way? Are they good or bad? Are they bad capitalists or good capitalists? It all comes down to trying forever to find the alliance. And they found it. All of a sudden, next year, they were in full support of Roosevelt, the commander-in-chief.

What about today? There's another friend of ours by the name of Gus Hall. He has a tendency to pen things. Bad mistake. These guys ought to learn just to talk. Of course, now with tape recorders, we've got them even on that score. Here he's writing in 1960. There's the big antiwar movement developing, the peace movement, the stop-the-bomb business, and he's going to tell us how to end the Cold War. I totally recommend you don't follow the advice. Everybody read this if you get a chance. You'll see how it's not directed to workers, it's directed to the capitalists: why it's to their advantage. It happens not to be to their advantage, but they're desperately trying to find some section they can try to convince, and that's their whole tactic. Let me show you. "Let us discuss some of the facts which show the harm done by the Cold War policies. First of all, what has happened to the U.S. share of capitalist world production? The U.S. share of capitalist world production had declined from 58 to 45 percent." We had more than half. My goodness, we should always have more than half, shouldn't we? Something must be wrong. We're not doing as well. The profit rate might even be dropping. My goodness, we've got to bring this Cold War to an end.

But how did we get into it if it's not in our advantage? There was a bad capitalist, and his name, no, it's no joke, this is just the way it is, his name was Churchill. He started the whole thing. He gave a talk, out there somewhere in the middle of the United States, I forget where. "The old fox knew what he was doing. He gave a wrong lead as far as the United States was concerned. He had something different in mind than most Americans believed. It's obvious that Churchill and the American architects of the Cold War did not understand the moment nor the force of history." Old Churchill came over here, and the British capitalists had all types of bad intentions. They always have the bad and good capitalists. In fact, he's got a scoreboard in this pamphlet on Kennedy. He scores them up and down. Bad, good. Pretty good on civil rights. A little bad over here. Shouldn't have started the war in Vietnam. And he scores them. That's their attitude to class struggle. The press should get down on their knees and look around for that good capitalist so they can all start praying for them.

That is, in essence, what their politics is. With that type of party having hegemony within the socialist movement, so that they outnumbered us a hundred to one and controlled CIO unions after unions and were able to block us at every turn, you can understand why we suffered this unnecessary defeat in the class, why we could not have our own party, why we had to continue to stand helpless before the two parties of capitalism. Because they had the hegemony in the radical movement, and it's their defeat within the radical movement, and only their defeat, that can assure that the whole movement won't be diverted and derailed the next time. The Democratic Party, from the capitalist point of view, has been very effective.

By the way, I'd just love to sit here and talk for about two hours just about the CP and its history, to see all the sides of it, and how the capitalists used it. How, when they didn't need it, they just turned around and kicked it out the door. And how the Communist Party, the individuals in it, found themselves helpless and defenseless. Because all they had done is spend their time going up and down, chasing militants, red-baiting, and doing everything they could to break the power of the working class. And all of a sudden, when the capitalist class attacks, they find themselves defenseless. Of course. The only base where they could find support, the only people who are going to give anybody any support for their civil liberties, is the working class. And if you spend all your time attacking it, you can't expect support.

The antiwar movement and the student mentality

Let's go up to today in terms of the situation. It's very unlikely that we're going to have a labor party around the corner, though a lot of things may be in store for us around the corner. We're not sure. We have to be very patient and very conservative in our attitude regarding any immediate changes in the economy or anything like this, because the main thing we have to do is prepare ourselves and develop a cadre, a socialist cadre that can change the situation when it arises. But there may be changes in store for us not too long from now. Looking at the present situation, struggle has moved into different arenas. There's the Negro struggle, there's the antiwar struggle. Which way will it go? Once again the same fundamental question is posed. Will the movement seek independence from the ruling class, build independent formations that fight against the ruling class, that continuously fight to broaden and to enter new forces into formations that are independent from the ruling class and that attack it? Or will the antiwar movement and the Negro struggle subordinate themselves to trying to find goodies in the ruling class to support?

Let me show you the mentality of the average student. The average student, not being in the working class, not having the faintest idea of the real power that exists in the relationship to production of the workers and their numbers. Thirty thousand, or whatever it was, in New York could tie up New York City like this in one strike. Seventeen thousand mechanics could tie down the airlines. That's real power. There's no way to stop that. There's no gimmick the ruling class can use to get around that. Students are five million strong, but they can't do one-tenth of that. God, if the VDC had just had control of the means of transportation in the country, we'd stop the war by educating everybody else and carrying out the necessary actions. But that power is not understood. The only power the student sees is the power of the ruling class. So when a Wayne Morse or a Senator Gruening comes along and says this war is evil, this war is bad (Gruening, shoot him down in the Dominican Republic but leave him alone over there, we want to trade with Asia, we're up in Alaska, whatever his motivation may be, it doesn't matter what the individual motivation is) when he expresses that as a senator, as part of the ruling class, the student says, wow, there's power.

Wayne Morse comes to Redwood City, three thousand antiwar people, every one of them, I believe, an honest antiwar person opposed to the war in Vietnam. Wayne Morse gets up there and says we ought to support those individuals who are planning this thing, and names Fulbright and some of these other people, and he says we ought to get behind the Gavin plan. You know what the Gavin plan is? The United States should occupy Vietnam in the most economical way possible. That is, just take cities and set up little units, barricade yourself in real good, and then just go out there and raid and bomb the hell out of them, and don't waste any lives. He gets up and says we ought to support the Gavin plan, and this whole crowd goes applauding the very opposite of what they're for. But the man has power. He represents part of the ruling class. They see power in him, and they don't see power within themselves. They don't see a power within the unions. The unions are all lined up behind the war. They don't see power behind the civil rights organizations, so that's beginning to change somewhat, because those organizations wouldn't speak against the war, and they too supported Johnson. They too were part of this coalition.

Let me just quote to you from an article in the SDS paper. I just got to read it tonight, and it has such an excellent phrase in it I wanted to quote it to you. It's written attacking us, of course. Everybody's always attacking us. Around the NCC, there was a conference some of the supporters of the NCC held, and they booted two people who opposed coalition politics out of the meeting, and they wouldn't let them sit because they said they're Trots. Then he has this long thing, and finally he gets near the end and he's going to get real philosophical and figure it out. He's going to tell us how we're going to end the war. Here's what he says. "As for the possibility of stopping the war, my own feeling is," and then he talks a little about how the national liberation forces will continue to fight. That's students' belief too. They really believe the colonial revolution is going to continue to fight, and they're right about that. That's very important, that they understand that. Then he says: "Sons, brothers, husbands are going to be drafted and killed, and there's going to be inflation. There's going to be restrictions on labor. There's going to be increased tabling of necessary social reforms." That's all wonderful. So what's going to happen? The workers are going to rise up? There's going to be a new party? There's going to be a militant action? We're going to challenge the ruling class? The army will come over to our side and we're going to solve this problem? No. "Certain decisive elements in our society will come to feel that they don't want to pay the price, that they do want to bring the troops home, that they'll elect someone who will bring peace. The antiwar movement can help articulate such feelings as these, but let's recognize that we won't be ending the war."

In other words, we'll put pressure on, and some of the people in power will eventually recognize this, and they'll elect one or two in there, maybe Bobby or somebody who will realize that this is all wrong and change. That's a perspective out of desperation, because there isn't a single sign from the ruling class, in any section of it whatsoever, that they aren't for these wars.

They aren't for smashing the colonial revolution. And more fundamental than whether you find a speaker here or there is this: show us economically how any class that is ruling over us, any section of that class, can benefit by the victory of the colonial revolution, and the political implications, because that is what you're talking about. You can't have it both ways. You can't say the ruling class is going to end this war and not say that it's in their interest to have the war end. But that's the way most students feel, and we should try to understand that. They don't see the question of Democratic Party politics as one of principle, because they only see one power, the ruling class, and they look for every division within it and look to it. However, the average student is also suspicious that he's going to be sold out. He's suspicious of anybody over thirty, and all the senators and representatives are over thirty. He's suspicious of them because he's seen so many people that he's been told to support.

And this, by the way, for our generation, starts with LBJ. Every organization went on record to put LBJ in that White House, that this was the thing to do. Get him the biggest possible vote, except for the YSA. We said the bigger the vote you get him, the more reactionary he's going to be, the more he can go to war, the more you've tied the hands of the people, the workers, the Negro people and the students, to protest. The more you just get behind him. And now the Du Bois Club isn't running around saying, gee, look, weren't we great, we supported LBJ. SDS isn't walking around with their buttons, "Part of the way with LBJ." The only ones who talk about the LBJ question is the YSA. We don't talk about our front groups openly.

The Scheer campaign in Berkeley

Let's take this whole question in the concrete and see how it's affecting us right now, in the movement we're working in, the movement we're giving our rest and sleep for, our blood and sweat for, the antiwar movement. What's happening? Let's look at the strongest possible position of those who support coalition politics. Take their strongest case and deal with it. Give them every benefit of the doubt. Let's look at the Scheer campaign. The Scheer campaign is a classical example of an attempt to get militant activists, young students, to enter and to work for coalition politics. It bases itself on radical, militant-sounding phrases in order to bring them in, and then gets them to work in essence for forming a wing within the Democratic Party, in order to carry out a continuous program of coalition politics in which candidates are chosen on one or another basis.

I'll never forget that day when the YSA, we were trying to nail him down as much as we could at that VDC meeting. I remember Sid Stapleton getting up and throwing at him, "You'll be supporting other Democrats." He said, "No, sir." By the end of the campaign, every time he spoke there was a line behind him so long you couldn't see where it ended, of Democrats getting on, trying to get in on the legwork from the students.

Let me show you how the Scheer campaign began. Have you ever thought, how did it begin? Where was the conference that nominated Scheer? Did the antiwar movement call a conference, and was there debate, and were different candidates proposed, and different alternatives? Should we maybe not run candidates? Should we maybe do one thing or another? How did Scheer become a candidate? Let me tell you. Scheer people have also learned how to write, and they wrote. "Who is the Scheer for Congress Committee? Good question. Last summer, a group of East Bay citizens attempted to convince Congressman Cohelan to publicly oppose the war." There's nothing wrong with that. It would be much better if they spent their time convincing working people about how to oppose the war. "Dismayed by their failure, they began a search for a new candidate for Congress."

What have you got here? You've got some people in the Cohelan camp, people that supported Cohelan, people in the Democratic machine, who went out and opposed the war. They wanted another candidate to represent them, and so they started looking for one. But you just can't run a campaign out of the blue. You've got to have workers. You've got to have people who go door to door. And you can't just get these out of the blue, especially when you're bucking the machine. You've got to build your own machine. That takes money and it takes work. They don't have money like the Democratic Party. They haven't got the tie-in with the trade union bureaucracy and all these other tie-ins. So you can't just build it out of the blue. You might be able to get the money, but you still have to get those workers.

"During the same period, the Vietnam Day Committee sponsored a dramatic series of direct actions and marches. The participation in these events demonstrated that vast numbers of people in this district opposed the war. The success of the VDC suggested to many people that even greater opposition could be demonstrated in electoral activity." Very simple. A big antiwar movement comes along. Some people who are permanently engaged in coalition politics, sections of the petty bourgeoisie, the Communist Party and other formations, see this large layer of new activist kids and ask, how can we get them in there? To get them in you've got to have a militant candidate. So they came after that Vietnam Day Committee endorsement. They wanted it like they wanted blood. Not because they wanted the VDC, not because they ever intended to use it, but because once they had that endorsement, then they could reach the kids and get them into the Scheer campaign.

I'll never forget. We came after the YSA caucus and everything, and we were ready to go in there and try to teach somebody something over this. We went into those meetings, and Scheer wouldn't show, and Scheer wouldn't show, and Rubin [?] was back there maneuvering and counting. He would count whether he was going to carry the vote or not, and at some meetings he said, "Jeez, I can't carry the vote." I'll never forget I caught him, because I was sitting behind him while he was talking to the caucus, and he says, "Sure, we can't win this meeting. Don't speak at this meeting." So the next meeting comes. Finally they get all their people together and they're going to have a final showdown. And they come in, and they fight and fight. Our motion, which we stabilized and put on the floor, was: we don't endorse, we don't oppose. Those who want to work, try this, fine. Those who want to work another way, fine. This is a place where we all work against the war. This is an independent committee which everyone is welcome in. You don't force down its throat one candidate or another. That was the motion. Not that you have to support socialism. Not that you have to make a principled declaration for independent politics. Nothing of the sort. Just keep the unity of the antiwar movement.

They wouldn't have anything to do with it. They came in demanding. They must have that endorsement. They got it. They beat us two to one. A hundred and ten to fifty-five was the vote. You know what? They never once printed on any of their literature the fact that the VDC endorsed them. They didn't need it after that. They had it. They could get the kids. They got the kids. They destroyed the VDC in essence. It went downhill straight from then on, with a couple of little eruptions, before it faltered, before it was rebuilt. And from then on in their literature (I may be wrong about this, because they put out a hell of a lot of literature, I tried to keep up with it but I couldn't do it) you know that Scheer spent more on his campaign than any other person has ever spent in the state of California except for a statewide election. So it's hard to keep up. But in almost all his stuff, never does it mention the VDC. In fact, here's one of his pieces, "U.S. Congress, 7th Congressional District." I have a whole mess of them here. They always mention the fact that the CDC, the California Democratic Council, supports him. In fact, the Women for Peace.

One could theoretically predict that if we were right, if this was the essence and the meaning of the Scheer campaign, then the Scheer campaign would come into conflict with the independent committees against the war when they carried out actions which alienated sections of the middle class and alienated their attempt to build some sort of coalition within those layers in the Democratic Party. That could be a theoretical proposition from our stand. And that's exactly what happened on April 12th, when the VDC attempted a demonstration in which there was a minor element of civil disobedience, when people spoke over a microphone in violation of a sound ordinance, which proved to be unconstitutional. Let me point out something to you. In Port Chicago right now, there are people throwing themselves in front of trucks, which is a clear violation of the law. We don't necessarily agree with this tactic. We admire people, no matter who, who've got their heart in the right place and are opposed to this war. But there isn't a word out of Scheer against that. Not a word. But when the VDC, an independent antiwar committee, militantly just violated the sound ordinance, the next day on campus we were faced with a lineup of their speakers attacking the independent war committee, the VDC, about how we were tricking people, how we were manipulating, how we were running dangers of getting people hurt, this and that, everything to disassociate themselves. Scheer wasn't even present and wouldn't be. So that tended to confirm for people who might have had doubts the nature of the Scheer campaign.

Scheer himself is being perfectly honest. Scheer, the man, is a perfectly honest politician. He was asked at one of the VDC meetings, are you for capitalism? Are you for socialism? He said, I'm for capitalism. He's for capitalism and he wants to end the war. Why shouldn't he join his class's party? Why shouldn't he work with them? He says he's opposed to the Democratic Party when he means he's opposed to the policies that the Democratic Party has. If it would modify its policies, he wouldn't be opposed to it. He says he's been a registered Democrat all his life and that he'll be one. He sees no principle involved in any way, because it's just a question within his class, though he doesn't think in those terms, the class that he supports. And we've got to respect the man. He's a capitalist politician; the extreme left wing are the capitalist politicians. But we know that there can be no end to this war under capitalism. And that's the question that must be entered in your mind before you even begin this year. There's no use discussing whether it's right or wrong if you don't know yet. If you haven't decided in your own mind whether the war in Vietnam, and what that means, the whole colonial revolution, the whole danger of war, the whole existence of imperialism, and what it means in terms of war and peace, can be solved by the present ruling class. If you're not absolutely sure that it cannot, then the Scheer campaign is not unreasonable. But as socialists, what we try to do, of course, is to educate and to explain the class nature of our society, and the fact that we are going to face these wars from here on in. In fact, we're going to face the very danger of the death of all mankind, if capitalism and the war-making powers are not taken out of their hands.

Lowndes County and the Black Panther Party

Tomorrow Betsy's going to give a talk on the Black Panther Party, but I want to say one other thing about this immediate period in the context of the antiwar movement. Just as Berkeley, the mystical radical center of America, was debating whether to go out and try to recruit every Negro we could in the ghetto to the Democratic Party, at the exact same time a very courageous small section of the working class in Lowndes County was breaking from capitalist politics, stepping out on their own, just a few thousand strong, taking on the whole system and declaring their independence. They would be no party to the Democratic Party. They would have nothing to do with the people who are left here. They were stepping out, forming their own formation. And what was the student movement doing in Berkeley? Going out into the ghetto? Telling them about the Black Panther Party? Telling them about the people who are standing up on their own? No. Registering them into the party of war and racism. And telling them, we've got a good one this year. He's so goddamn good, he's against war and racism. He's running in the same party, by the way. You have to register here. Thank you very much.

And how did they run this year? This is a new movement. Join our movement, let's liberate ourselves. No, no. It wasn't called the antiwar movement or the Black Panther Party. That's what it was called: the Scheer campaign. I couldn't find it, but I was trying to look, and I've got to find it, God, I can't lose that. It's a pamphlet that says "Scheer is concerned about your children." Isn't that wonderful to know? I bet you every Negro family that saw that was extremely pleased to find out that there was a man, in spite of his beard, who was concerned about their children. I'm sure they were extremely happy and they just wished that this might have some results. But I suspect also that no one in the ghetto expected, just out of class instinct, that they were going to solve their problems this way.

In fact, the Scheer campaign is a classical bourgeois campaign in the way it was run. It wasn't based on building a movement. It wasn't based on laying a groundwork. It wasn't based like the Black Panther Party is. John Hulett [?], the chairman of the party, won't run as a candidate precisely because he doesn't want to make it a one-man thing, precisely because he wants the representatives to come out of the people and not just the leaders stand up as the candidate. He wants it to be a movement. He wants it to live beyond the elections. And he tries to base it on the people through their actions, their organization. They decide the candidates. What is the Scheer campaign? Just the opposite. A brilliant scholar backed up by 58,000 [?] stands up and looks to the militants and says, come in, you've got to support me. I'm running for Congress. And why? Because I oppose the war. And now go out and recruit the people who live in this community who haven't gotten around to being registered by either the trade union bureaucrats, the Uncle Toms, or anybody else who works in the Democratic Party. You get out there and pick up those who've had questions in their minds, who don't like the Democratic Party or are beginning to break. You go convince them to get back in.

Of course, they never said that. That's the essence. That's what they did. They went among the students who are thinking against this war. Why, I remember Sid said a lot of good things at that meeting. I hope that's taped. I don't think it is. He said what we should be doing is burning membership cards in the Democratic Party. That would be an action that might have some impact in Washington and that might scare them off. Going out and recruiting to the Democratic Party sure won't.

The question that's posed before us is, what is the future? Is it the Black Panther or is it Scheer? Is it the type of independent action where working people in this country begin to join the millions throughout the world who are tired of being oppressed, who begin to understand what this system is doing to their lives and what it's done to past generations, and that there can be no solution under this system, and begin the struggle for socialism to change it? Or are we going to join the game of trying to find a millionaire who agrees with us? Are we going to join the game of subordinating what we stand for, what we need, in order to find an ally within the ruling class? That's the choice. I wanted to say a few other things about the Black Panther, but I want to leave that for Betsy tomorrow. Actually, she should have gone first. I'm very nervous all the time that I'm going to say things that she's going to talk about.

Let me just end with one last thing about coalition politics in this period. We're not going to see, taking the pulse of the objective conditions, a mass turn to independent political action. We're going to be on the defensive in this period for quite a while. The average member of the antiwar committees looks upon the question as a tactic from his viewpoint within the class struggle, from the point of view of what he can see, as I describe what it is. Therefore we've got to be extremely patient. We've got to go through this long period. But history has shown that in the last analysis it's not what you can do in the immediate. It's when the class as a class moves, the relationship of forces between reformists and revolutionaries, those who want to lead when the masses are ready to move, that have an apparatus who can turn to them and win them to a revolutionary program, and what the relationship is between them and those who approach it with a reformist program. That relationship will express itself, and the cadre of the YSA versus the cadre of the reformist tendencies: the CP in the first instance, the YPSL, if we can find it, in the second. And from that score, all our patience and all our hard work in this period, in winning new allies, in winning people to think about socialism, to open their minds, and in winning new cadre for the YSA, we can actually lay the groundwork for winning the battles when the time comes that we can settle the questions that the world is facing in a definitive and final way, which will be the creation of a socialist society.

Questions and discussion

I guess we'll... Questions? Anybody got any questions, comments, disagreement, arguments? Motions? Do you think I exaggerated?

Question: On the news about a week ago, the Ramparts [?] editor and a couple of other candidates said that they're fed up with Brown, they're fed up with Reagan, and they're going to start out on their own and form an independent party of Democrats. I'd like to hear your analysis of it and whether or not you're going to support this.

Camejo: Very serious question. To carry the question to its logical conclusion, the question is, how do you determine when a political motion is independent and when it isn't? There are many borderline cases. The history of the SWP is one in which every time there has been a borderline case, the party attempted to give the benefit of the doubt to the borderline case. But this question involved now is not a borderline. This is rather clear. There are three ways you can use a rule of thumb in approaching any formation, which Cannon outlined in 1948 in his explanation of the Progressive Party. First, you look at its program. Never mind what class is supporting it or what class it is made up of. What class does it support? Don't forget that in the last analysis, everything is classes. Marx was right about that. Not wrong. He was right. Our society is made up of classes. There are people who work for a living, there are people who own. And that's the fundamental basis upon which their objective interests are made. That just happens to be true. It may be unfortunate, you may not like it, the professors don't like it, Keating may not know about it, but it's true. And because it is true, you've got to look at it that way. Theory is worthless if it doesn't describe reality. But if it does describe reality, you are insane to throw it out the window. And Marx happens to be describing the reality of 1966 America. We are living in a class society.

What class is Keating's for? You look at his program. It calls nowhere for a party of the working class. He wants a party that's independent. It's going to be independent of the Democratic and Republican. We know that "number two" is not magical. There could be three capitalist parties. It could be five. It could be ten. It could be twenty. It could be one. Most likely what Keating thinks he's doing is setting up a non-class party or group. It's not based on any one class. In the context of American politics today, in the context of the fact that we do live in a class society, and the fact that Keating has no class space... Let me tell you something else. The program is number one. We just look at his program straightforward. There's nothing in it that calls for class political action, working class or anything of the sort. Number two, the next thing you look at is how it turns out in action. What does this person actually do?

Does he get up and make speeches about how workers must break from the Democratic Party because working people need a party of their own? Or does he get up and say that wise, thinking people who have looked over the situation believe that we should end this war, period? In other words, as a class orientation, his actions are not geared that way, not in his speeches, or in the way he lives, or what he does, or the organizations he joins, or anything else. And the very fact that it's built on individuals and not a movement itself shows that it's not oriented to the working class. The third thing you watch for is the class composition of the group involved. Well, most certainly Keating is an intellectual; it's not a party of workers. You can have a party of workers that's got a bourgeois program, and the attitude we take to that is sometimes quite different, because we can try to convince workers to change their program. But there's no use getting into a party whose program, actions and base are non-working-class. So of course we're not supporting it, any more than we supported the Wallace movement. If you've got questions on this, go back and read the bulletin that the YSA put out on the Progressive Party, written by Cannon back then.

At the time of the Progressive Party, when the Cold War began, the CP thought it had found a section of the capitalist class that agreed with it for coexistence, and they only had one good capitalist, and that was Wallace. And they did just like the Scheer campaign: it became called the Wallace movement, an individual. The program was liberal capitalism. He even talked about who's going to nationalize the railroads and stuff like that. That was bait. But their program was pro-capitalist. They wanted the Wallace section of the capitalist class, which didn't include much beyond Wallace, to run the country. And they based their activity, and they got their membership and their work, from radicals, from the labor movement, from the student movement, from the Negro movement. They tried to build a third liberal capitalist party. We opposed it. As soon as the Korean War broke out, Wallace folded.

I don't want to go into this because it's quite involved to deal with the whole question of just when a party can be called working-class. I'll try to give you an outline of how to think about it, but the other thing to keep in mind is that you've got to work out every individual case in context. It depends upon the context and the nature of the class struggle at that time. To really make that clear, imagine that a radicalization engulfs America, and thousands upon tens of thousands of people start joining the Socialist Workers Party. And in this process, the trade union bureaucrats want to set up a labor party to cut off the development. We would oppose it. So there's no yes or no on these questions. It depends on the context. And in the context of today, Keating's election campaigns are for the purpose, and have the effect, whether he subjectively wants to or not, it's got nothing to do with it, the effect they have is to draw kids away from antiwar propaganda to work within the Democratic Party, to work in support of electoral capitalist candidates, [inaudible] candidates.

By the way, the hardest thing for people to learn is that there are classes. Once you've mastered that, you can move along pretty fast, that is, if you choose the right class. But the hardest thing for students to do is to learn there are classes. A lot of times you'll sit down trying to recruit someone to the YSA, and you'll sit for hours, and you don't understand why you're not making any headway. They seem to agree about Vietnam. They seem to agree about civil rights. They agree about a whole mess of stuff, but they never really agree that their class exists, and therefore they cannot understand why in the world you want to seek the type of solution that you want. It's the hardest thing to convince them of, because of the present American context, when the class is not moving as a class politically. Okay, questions? Yes, Martin.

Martin: I'd like to put, I think, a little more emphasis on the third aspect of the opposition [?]. In Letters to Americans by Frederick Engels, in the last part of the nineteenth century, there was a big movement in this country led by a man named Henry George, who was for a while a labor official, the economist who believed in a single tax on land. This movement became very large, and the class composition was farmers and workers. And from the Marxists of the time, Florence Kelley wrote to Engels asking if Marxists should support it. She didn't think they should, because its program was anti-Marxist. And Engels said its program doesn't matter at this stage, that what matters is the class composition, that the fundamental task in America was to break the working class away from the two-party system into its own party, and that if this party could be stabilized and consolidated, that was the task for Marxism, and there would be plenty of time for programmatic troubles later. But the fundamental task was the party of the class, that that was the first task for American Marxism, and that was the [inaudible] movement.

Camejo: Let's make this very clear. The basic problem in America today, and it has been since the time of Henry George, is that the working class is a class that has no political arm. There's no party of its own. That's what Engels was addressing himself to, and you're absolutely right about that. That's the fundamental. The demand we raise right now, and the SWP has been raising, is the formation of a labor party. We haven't raised yet what type of program we want it to have once it were established. Our whole emphasis would be to fight for a socialist program within the labor party, but the question before us is the break. But you have to be careful not to formulate it simply on composition, and I know you didn't intend this, I'm just saying in general, because it has another context: the actual establishment of a class party. You've got the Liberal Party in New York. It's a capitalist party, and it's based upon some trade unions. Its composition could be called working-class, but its essence and its whole direction is that it's just another capitalist party, and it's not geared in any way to strive to be a working-class party. But that is the problem we face, and until that problem is crossed in one way or another, there can be no solution and no building of a mass movement that can change this country, until the working class breaks politically from capitalist parties.

We have to define what you mean by composition, that is, the ties between the class that is supposedly within this party and the party. The working class is in the Democratic Party, that's what the Communist Party says, but they're not in it as workers. They're in it on the basis of their neighborhoods, their regions. All the Democratic Party caucuses cut across class lines completely. There is no tie between a union and the party. A union carries no weight in the Democratic Party. It doesn't vote as a union. It doesn't carry a block of votes. The workers are in the Democratic Party in the sense that every year the Democrats convince them that the Republican is such a son of a bitch that they ought to vote against him. And occasionally they're so convinced by the dirty politics of the Democrats that they go out and vote Republican to stop that son of a bitch. That is the level at which the class participates in politics at this point. The average worker doesn't belong to any political club. He doesn't go to any meetings. He doesn't decide anything. He's got nothing to do with whatever party he's registered in.

Speaker from the floor: I was kind of, well, not disappointed, but while the Scheer campaign was going on, I don't think it could have been attacked at that time any better than it was. But the everyday details of what was happening, really more attention should have been paid to them. You brought out a few of the most salient points. A couple of others that I know of: after the people who wrote this letter, Dr. Neil Simon [?] and the others, went out and got Scheer, there was a big march in Oakland. They already had Scheer as a candidate. They had a demonstration and a rally afterwards, and Rubin [?] got up there, Rubin being the leader of the VDC, one of the strongest left-wing promoters of Bob Scheer. He got up and made an extremely coy speech, saying, "We're trying to get Bob to run." It was already settled, but there's no honesty involved in this. And another thing, which is the same thing as that demonstration in the street: the demonstration that took place in April, that Pete mentioned, on the part of people in L.A. and Canada, was based on the demonstrations in the streets in Vietnam. We wanted to show our solidarity with them. At the time of the election, at the precinct where I went to vote, somebody was handing out a little white piece of paper that said, "While people in Vietnam have to demonstrate in the streets and strike, you here in the quiet of your voting booth can determine whether there will be war or peace."

Camejo: Brian raised a very important question. How do you carry out a fight? What are the tactics? I'm sure that we didn't do it the best way. It's very hard to do things the best way. One of the problems we faced in combating Scheer was that the best way to do it wasn't just to make a broadside attack and have a political discussion that was way above the political understanding of the overwhelming majority of people participating in it, simply because they're not socialists, simply because they're not sure there are classes. What we try to do, what we continue to try to do, is to present our general position very carefully, very quietly and very patiently, through the YSA and talking to people. At the same time we try to keep alive an independent antiwar movement, a movement that's independent of the Democratic Party, and through that, by living example, show how to fight the war without capitulating, without supporting the ruling class. Combining both those tactics, one can be much more effective. But there are also times, it's also a purely tactical question, when it's better to take them on straightforwardly. And of course we did that within the antiwar movement at the time when the Scheer question came up. We just took them on straightforwardly and explained why they shouldn't. We'll do that any time of the week, because our goal is making a revolution in this country, not whether next week we're popular or not. As revolutionaries, we're going to be extremely unpopular in this country for quite a while. People aren't revolutionaries. There's going to be all types of people red-baiting us. Sometimes we get red-baited by reds. By some of these [inaudible] you get red-baited all the time, and as such you see we can't bend to this.

There might come a day when we have to run a candidate. The correct thing to do is to run a candidate against Scheer. We will. If it should come at this point, the best thing for us to do, I think, is what we did: patiently explain. I think we want a lot of people to realize that there is more to the question. I think we want a lot of people to realize that they ought to think it out carefully. And I think we've got a lot of people nervous about the fact that they're working to support the Democratic Party. More than that, I think we have very clearly won some people over to opposing coalition politics, and in fact even recruited to the YSA out of the Scheer campaign. John, [inaudible] a few weeks ago.

John: Assuming that Scheer does run for the [?] again, and a similar tactic to that used in the VDC will be pulled with the United Committee, what could be done in order to defeat this without encouraging a split in the organization or a dissolution of it, as happened to the VDC?

Camejo: Our number one concern in that situation, if the VDC debate should take place again, is once again to prevent a split in the antiwar movement. We have tried, and I don't think anyone can say honestly that the YSAers haven't tried, but we're human. We get excited too, occasionally. We try to build an antiwar movement which will welcome and include anyone who is opposed to this war, who is for self-determination in Vietnam, regardless of what they think on other questions. That's the type of committee we should try to fight for in the United Committee. And this will be our line, that we don't endorse or not endorse, but that we welcome both.

Speaker from the floor: Students want action. I'm just elaborating what you're saying in a concrete way. They want action. When they hear anyone say, well, let's stop and think about it, or let's not do something, like let's not run, let's not support Scheer, whenever they hear "let's not do this," without a "let's do that" as opposed to it, they get very irritated, because they want to do something. No matter if it's right or wrong, they want to do something. And it wasn't quite so dramatic in February or December, whenever that question was raised, not to support a political candidate. People said, well, we're tired of running around in the streets. What we want to do is have political action. They didn't care whether it was right political action or wrong political action. They wanted political action. And it was a very difficult question to deal with, because the only political action that was possible at that time was wrong political action, in the sense of running candidates.

Camejo: Make that very clear. It's not the electoral scene. That may be the case at the moment. And we should be very clear about using electoral means. In fact, you see Lenin in his pamphlet... You know the classical example of a student: they believe in the Trotskyites. Students call us Trotskyites, where there are no Trotskyites alive that I know. There are Trotskyists. The difference is that Trotskyites is one of belief in the man, and we believe in the ideas of the man Trotsky. So we don't care if you call us that; it's perfectly okay with us. We can call them what we think they are too. But we shouldn't forget, what I was trying to say, I'll quote Lenin, in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, points out that one of the most difficult periods to work in is when you're in a reactionary period, when there isn't mass motion. And that in those periods it's extremely important to take advantage of any aspect of bourgeois democracy, and especially something like electoral activity, because you have a good chance to reach the masses, to speak to them and so forth. Right now the SWP is running a top-notch campaign in New York City, in which they've got Judy White running for governor of New York State, and she'll be the youngest governor in New York. She was just awarded a medal up in Boston for her antiwar work by some reverend of some sort. We ought to find out what denomination it is, make sure Sparrow [?] says it's the right denomination. They're engaging in electoral politics, and it's one hundred percent valuable. You get TV time, you get radio time, you get all this. It's extremely valuable.

And therefore, for Christ's sake, when you argue on this question, get it down to the basic question that's involved, the class question. Don't argue about whether Scheer's doing a good job of opposing the war, or even whether this vote isn't really an antiwar vote. It most certainly is. Those people who vote for Scheer were trying to vote against the war. No use kidding ourselves about that. It may not be the way to end the war, but that's just fact. And it's true as a whole that Scheer stuck to his line for withdrawal. That is also a fact. It's true he slips in negotiations every now and then, but that's not what made it wrong. In fact, coming out for withdrawal made it more wrong, in a sense, in that it fooled more people who were militants. So we don't say the electoral question is good or bad in itself. It's good if it's used correctly. It's a very powerful weapon. And I'm sorry, Brian. Just one other thing.

Brian: Make sure people get this in their minds, those who were in the meeting. The vote was two to one to endorse Scheer. The majority of the people there, however, did not like the idea of a Democratic Party, a capitalist party campaign. They said, Scheer is running. That was a fait accompli with them. There's this guy who decided to run. As a matter of fact, that very morning, or it might have been the day before, he announced at a press conference that he was running. So that's what they had. The students were facing the fact: here's something going on. And even though the majority of them, I'd say about two to one the other way, did not like the particular nature of that campaign, they still were stuck with Scheer, and they were stuck with this thing that Pete said is drugged into you all the time, which is the man. Here's the man who's written two books. Wow.

Camejo: That's right. Absolutely true.

Speaker from the floor: Brian should point out something else, too, which is a trap that would probably be very easy to spring at any time. There were two or three VDC meetings, before the meeting when the vote was taken, in which the question came up of whether Scheer was going to run. One of the big questions was whether or not he was going to run as an independent. It was made very clear to the VDC, at any rate, that what Scheer really wanted was to run as an independent. So a committee was appointed to investigate whether a person could successfully run as an independent, and then they came back and reported to us that all of the facts showed it would just be impossible to run anyone successfully as an independent. At that point we said, well, all right, it's important to run an antiwar candidate, and if there's no successful way to get him on the ballot as an independent, then we'll have to accept his running as a Democrat.

Camejo: There is a successful way to run candidates independently in the Bay Area, and the SWP has done it. It's very tricky, and it takes very good organization, but the last independent assembly district candidates in the Bay Area were the candidates run by the SWP.