SWP History of the 1940s

The Militant subscription drives

In the last two sessions you've heard an analysis of the post-war period, both in its political and its trade union aspects. Now I'm going to pick this up with the reflection of this whole period on the party itself. It was a period of expansion, up to now the major expansion of the party. And what's interesting, I guess you can see it by the meeting this evening, is that that period too had a great number of fields in which to work. All I can do is give you a sort of summary of the main fields, and if you have any other questions, just ask them at the end of the educational. Now, the reason it was a period of change was that it was the end of the war and the changeover from the war economy to the peacetime economy.

With all the dislocations that took place then, you had huge plants like the Willow Run plant that was shut down, thousands and millions of people actually out of work. You had the emergence of the United States in its new role as world leader, and its attempt, first of all, to housebreak the working class at home and then to establish its role on the world scene. That posed a whole series of questions that had a political impact upon the population. So what you had was a period of rapid changes and tensions and shifts. And among them was, of course, the question of unemployment, the question of the shift over in jobs. Inflation played a big role then as it does now. Now, the party was able to meet the opportunities open to it very much as it's doing right now. It did it through the pacing of the Militant's sub drives.

During the period from 1942 to 1944, the party was essentially on the defensive. You had the Minneapolis case, you had the wartime restrictions. As part of that, they tried to take away the second-class mailing rights of the Militant, and that battle was fought over a two-year period and won. So by 1944, while the comrades were in jail with the substitute leadership operating, the party opened up on the offensive. It launched an $18,000 fund drive, on the basis of $1,000 for every comrade in jail, and launched a sub drive as well. Now, the first experiments on the sub drives took place in San Francisco. Carol McCarry [?] and a few others made some probes into a few areas and found it was possible to sell subs. On the basis of the experiment, a national goal was set of 3,000 subs. This was in 1944. A 25-cent sub for 13 weeks. You can get the feeling of inflation right there, can't you?

At that time it seemed like a fantastic goal for us. But the party plunged in and got the feel of it very quickly and doubled its quota. It came out with over 7,000 subs. Now, this response that they got in the sub drives gave a shot in the arm to every branch. An expansion began immediately with the contacts obtained, the enthusiasm, and so on. The Militant press run ran up to 17,500, which was a real high for us. And a real effort was made to expand and brighten up the paper. It expanded to eight pages, which should be like 16 pages now, since it was a large-sized paper. It was brightened up, the Laura Gray cartoon started to be printed, columns were started on the Negro struggle, on the labor movement, and so on. This was the first time that we held what was called the Militant Institute, where a really serious discussion was held on what the role of the Militant was, how it could be improved, how it could be expanded and sold.

On the basis of that whole summary and review of the work of 1944, in 1945 we launched two sub drives, one in the spring and one in the fall. At this time it was a 25-cent sub for six months. The goal was $10,000. It was begun with a national Red Sunday when every branch in the country went out on the Sunday to launch the drive. In spite of all the optimistic expectations we had, we found that they were all conservative, because in the 10-week drive the party gained 22,437 subs. The example that I can give you is that in San Francisco we had a quota of 350 then and we obtained 636. Every single branch went way over its quota. On top of that, the trailblazing system was started at that time. We sent out a couple of comrades into the Ohio-Michigan area, the industrial area, and they went from city to city where we didn't have any functioning branches. In that 10-week period, the two comrades got 899 subs. In fact, the top score nationally, there was a national contest on, and this is still a mark to shoot at: one comrade, working on his own, got 859 subs. That's over 80 a week. Well, I don't think I should answer that question. I don't know what happened to him.

Now, the drive in the fall was complicated by the problem that it had to be combined with the callbacks on the spring sub drive. So it only made a little bit over $10,000, the quota that it had set itself. And the party was faced with this problem, as I think we'll be faced with now, of trying to get all the renewals and still expand the circulation of the paper. The attempt was started in 1946. It was also complicated by the fact that the party was involved in so much other activity, the strike wave and everything else, that it wasn't able to concentrate on the sub drive as it had done in the spring. So an attempt was made to establish a quota system of two subs per member per month. But that never worked out. Even though it was tried, the period after '46 was complicated by the fact that the period of reaction was setting in, so the whole system of individual quotas never quite panned out.

The Militant became known in that period. It was distributed free at all the strike picket lines. It was in every major situation. It expanded its run. I think the maximum run for a special situation was either 35,000 or 40,000. Essentially you can sum it up by saying that the sub drives changed the whole picture for the party and provided the groundwork for all the other expansion work that we did, so the present drive becomes a key for us for the further expansion work that the party is going to enter into now.

Work among black Americans

So I'd like to take up the different phases of work that we engaged in. Probably the most important was that of the black struggle. It was called Negro work in those days. A large section of the sub drives were in the black areas. It was the area that gave the biggest response to the Militant. The basic reason was that the blacks who had moved up north especially, feeling the full impact of the discriminatory process in the north as well as the south, were quite ready, looking for openings to express their anger. On top of that, the CP had cut itself off, because they had developed the whole concept of everything for the war, and their answer to the black struggle was, yes, that's important, but wait until after the war, because right now you have to fight Hitler. That didn't sit right at all, especially if discrimination took place right here. So in a sense we had an open field there, and we moved in on it. The response, as I said, was absolutely tremendous. I would say that between one-third and half the subs that were obtained during that year were sold in the black areas.

And the response was a real one. There's no question about that. For example, let me give the example we had in San Francisco. We had about 400 black readers of the Militant in '46, concentrated mainly in the Hunters Point area. As a result of the contact work we made, we began to recruit out of the area. We concentrated very heavily during that period on the problem of training and integration. In some cases we even had to try and teach some of the black women to read. In the Hunters Point area, the majority of the workers there had come up from Texas and had all the disadvantages of the Texas school system. We found that it was quite a problem at first even being able to make ourselves understood.

We recruited from the Hunters Point area almost from the start of '45. And we began to set up what were called discussion groups. We had one discussion group in the Hunters Point area that had as many as 40 people attending it. It discussed the various problems of the black struggle, and tried to relate them constantly to the entire struggle for socialism. We made some very fine members there, recruited them and developed them. There were whole periods that we would spend in the Hunters Point area, for example. I know many times I'd go around with our best comrade there to be introduced to new people. And the standard system was that she would introduce me, say, this is my organizer, same as they might have done in Texas, saying, this is my minister. And he would start from that point and try and open a discussion on what the Militant was trying to do in relating the black struggle to the entire idea of socialism.

At one point the San Francisco branch was over one third, or I don't know exactly, I'd say around 40% black. We concentrated with tremendous effort to work on the aspect of the integration into the party. Now this was a national problem. The party itself tackled that problem. It built a very active and important Negro cadre in the center. We had a column on the Negro struggle by Charles Jackson, who became a well-known writer in that period. For example, this pamphlet was sold, I think, in the thousands. It became well known throughout the entire conscious sections of the black areas.

We participated in cases of discrimination and fought some good battles there. In fact, the first organization by CORE to fight for the hiring of blacks in the black areas, say in supermarkets, was actually led by us. [Inaudible.] That was back in 1947, I think, where we forced the owners of the supermarkets to hire blacks. It was done officially through CORE, which had been organized only recently. We participated in many protest actions. We participated in the NAACP, which was the central organization of the black struggle in that period.

We found, for example, that it was very important to plan our socials very carefully for the purpose of making sure that there was a feeling of welcome to the new blacks that came around, because they found that they had limited social outlets, and the party social became a very important aspect of the work in the integration process. The big problem was that we could not develop any black leaders that could act as a spokesman, that could then act as the integration focus of this work. And the whole period itself was so short-lived that we weren't able to consolidate anything really. As soon as the real turn away from the war industry took place in 1945 and early 1946, we began to face the problem that the only openings offered to blacks were the post office or some of the city government agencies.

And with the start of the witch hunt, in trying to get a sub renewal, for example, or to draw them into activity and revisit them, the answer was, yes, it's absolutely right, we agree with you, but we have to protect our economic situation. It's the only thing open to us, especially in the post office. We tried for a year to establish the system where, when that case happened, we would have them take a sub, they accepted the paper and approved of it, and then deliver it personally to them every week. But of course that wore out as the time went on, and we gradually began to lose the majority of the black membership, basically owing to the fact that they wanted the answers to the black questions immediately and didn't see the tie-in between that and the socialist orientation of the party.

Anti-fascist work and the Communist Party

The period of '45-'46 also was very active in the anti-fascist work. Now, this was part of the general attempt to find the soft spots in the working class. The main spokesman for that period was Gerald L. K. Smith. He was a former lieutenant of Father Coughlin, and used all the same demagogy that Coughlin did. He started to try and find a base in California, beginning in L.A., and as soon as the word came that he was organizing there, under the inspiration of our comrades generally, the labor movement was reached, a tremendous opposition movement was developed. There were picket lines probably of 25,000 around the meetings that he tried to call. They were successful in preventing him from building a base in Los Angeles, so he came up here to try it and met the same treatment.

We played the real catalytic role in this whole anti-fascist drive, because every place that Smith showed up, the party was all ready for him. We would launch into a real drive through every channel that we had to reach into the labor movement and swing the labor movement into action on it. Especially here, since the Stalinists were in control of the CIO, we needled them to the point where they had to come out and take part in demonstrations against him. And we were successful. He came into this area twice. In fact, I believe there was a picket line in Oakland here of about three or four thousand people that cut his meeting down to only a few hundred people at best. Smith then tried to reach into the Midwest, into Detroit, Chicago and Minneapolis. Every place he turned, he found us facing him. So after a year's try he gave out. His drive was a failure, and probably all the source funds that had been fed him on the hope that he would build a viable fascist movement failed. And it's quite clear that Smith knew of our work there, because at one hearing in San Francisco he said right openly that he knows who his enemies are. They're the Stalinists and the Trotskyites. The Stalinists want to gag him, the Trotskyites want to kill him.

Now, the Stalinists were the big obstacle. I guess you all know that, but it's very hard to really conceive of the amount of the obstacle they were to us then. They had massive forces in the CIO movement as well as the other union movements. They had a daily paper on the West Coast, the People's World. They had a California Labor School which operated on a daily basis with many classes. They had all kinds of influence in all directions.

Now, in 1945 came the famous Duclos letter. In case you don't know what that was, this was a letter by a leader of the French CP who came to this country and blasted Browder and the CP for giving up its party and forming instead the Communist Political Association, which was actually a watered-down version even of the CP. It was based on the concept that Browder expressed openly of giving capitalism a life for almost, I think, 100 years, something like that. The Duclos letter caused an explosion in the ranks of the CP. There had been sections in the ranks that had been angered by the right-wing Browder move during the war and had been opening up protests inside of the party. With the Duclos letter they just burst out, so you had every single section of the CP nationally having internal problems, serious ones.

In fact, in California here, in Northern California, the opposition almost won a majority at the regional conference. Their only problem was that they weren't clear in what they wanted and they weren't organized, so the leadership, after a period of struggle, gradually isolated each different section, chopped them off one by one and disintegrated them. In that period you had a flowering of bulletins by people in various parts of the country blasting the CP leaders in their localities. If you count them up you would have at least 20 or 30 bulletins being published in different cities by different sections expelled out of the CP and attacking the CP policies. In California it was quite strong, and there were, I think, either two or three.

Now, of course, once that thing opened up, we opened up a campaign of pressure on the ranks of the CP to try and reach all these dissidents. In fact, it was a three-year campaign, but out of it we recruited, I think, only about three people in this area and made a number of contacts that stayed with us or worked with us over a period of years afterwards. The CP was able to stabilize itself partially under Foster, but as soon as the witch hunt hit, that completed the job that the Duclos letter had started.

Election campaigns and the Labor Party slogan

Another feature of our work in this whole period was the opening up of the election campaigns. It's old hat now, but it was brand new then. The first campaigns began in 1945, I think in the mayoral campaigns in Los Angeles and New York. I think Minneapolis was an exception: they ran campaigns ever since '38, I believe, so with them it was a normal procedure. But then the party as a whole entered into campaigns on a serious basis in '45. In '46 we ran a statewide write-in campaign. In '47 we began to participate in the city election in San Francisco and established our standard candidate, Frank Barbaria [?], as a major factor in the political scene in San Francisco. He was known as the socialist candidate and had a hearing over the entire area. In '48 we opened up our first presidential campaign, and that established a pattern too.

Also during that period we conducted quite a bit of critical support campaigns. Probably the most important of them was the support of Frankensteen [?] in Detroit, I believe in '45, where he ran for mayor. We conducted a great number of critical support campaigns for independent Negro candidates throughout the country. For a period there was quite an overextension of our enthusiasm on this point, because we began to pick up almost any black candidate who ran on any pretext as long as it seemed as if he was independent. The party had to retrench a little bit and be more careful in its choice of critical support campaigns.

In Oakland here we had the Oakland general strike in '46, which resulted in an independent campaign being run by the Oakland Voters League, which was operated by the Trade and Labor Council in Oakland here. We supported their candidates in, I believe it was, late '46 or early '47, in the city elections. They won, unfortunately, because they became absorbed into the Democratic Party very quickly, and that disappeared.

A very active part of our entire work during this whole period, in conjunction with our party campaigns, was a campaign we conducted throughout the unions and political areas on the Labor Party slogan. This was a basic part of our activity. We passed resolutions at unions, at conventions. We propagandized for it. We put out a pamphlet on it, which was sold all over, this one on the Labor Party. We were instrumental in getting a few of the auto locals in Flint to pass resolutions on the Labor Party. They published pamphlets on that. We circulated them nationally. The entire Labor Party campaign was probably a central part of our union activity throughout that whole period. It showed a lot of possibilities of success, because as the strikes took place in 1945, 1946 and 1947, the workers found that their economic gains were frustrated on the economic front by inflation. The whole question of a political answer to the economic situation became much more understandable. We began to get a response. But we didn't have that much power or influence, and the workers, I think, generally weren't prepared for a political answer at that time.

Where there were these currents that developed in the direction of a Labor Party, they were thwarted on two fronts: by the Stalinists on the one front, who tried to divert it and finally succeeded in diverting it into the Wallace campaign, and by John L. Lewis, who played a big role, for example, in fighting the Taft-Hartley Act and was drawing around him, as the focus, a lot of the political support that could turn very easily into a Labor Party campaign. But then Lewis sold it out. Instead of taking the independent road, he went and supported the Republicans, and in a sense blunted that whole action. And then once the reaction hit in, that whole aspect of it dropped.

The Goldman–Morrow faction fight and the party's growth

A different aspect of the entire period: the party recruited quite extensively out of the unions and black members who were basically the core of the working class too. And in a sense it became more and more a proletarian organization in its composition. Every single turn of that type usually has some kind of a reaction among those that cannot make that turn. It developed into a faction fight inside of the party under Goldman and Morrow [?] that really represented a sort of an intellectual-oriented wing. As part of their defensive action, they made overtures to the Shachtmanites. And Shachtman, in response to that, began a maneuver of getting some help from the international in that, and there was a long and elaborate correspondence between us and the Workers Party, lasting, I guess, a year and a half, whereby an attempt was made to feel out if there was a possibility of unification. We didn't know, really, until later that the reason that Shachtman engaged in it at all was that he was under pressure from the Johnsonites, who were pushing very hard inside the Shachtman organization to effect a unity.

Well, after a lot of these negotiations, the thing broke down, obviously. It ended with Goldman leaving the party, I guess, at the end of 1945, and Morrow [?] was expelled at the 1946 convention. The Johnsonites left the WP and joined us. So the political shift that took place was that we divested ourselves of the intellectual petty bourgeois section, and it went over to the SP and the Shachtmanites, and we gained the Johnsonites. They played a very active role in the party until about 1950, when the political differences sharpened to the point that they left. That's a separate story all by itself.

Now, as the party grew, it expanded rapidly in the size of the branches and in the number of the branches. I believe we reached the top of about 28 branches throughout the country at that time. Headquarters expanded, full-time party members grew in number. Unfortunately at that time we tried to build a youth movement but weren't able to. There was no radicalization on the campus at all at that time.

As part of the expansion, the Oakland branch was formed. In 1945 we set up a committee for the Oakland branch. It showed a lot of promise, so I believe we started off with five members here, then colonized and recruited. By 1946 a branch was constituted and went through, I think, a little bit of difficult flooding the first couple of years, but then stabilized. As part of the whole support activity for the new branch, we set up a Bay Area organization, called a Bay Area Section, composed of a Bay Area Executive Committee and the two branch execs. In a sense we anticipated the further expansion and were preparing for it. But the decline again cut us short. We found that we had a cumbersome apparatus then, a function whereby we would have a Bay Area exec and two branch execs operating with not that much activity that could warrant it. And with the decline in the party and the differences that began to develop inside the party as a result of it, the Bay Area organization was the first thing that came under attack. I believe it was finally dropped in 1950, and we went back to the two independent branch system.

Of course, this brings home to me the lesson that organizational steps are important, but it's important also not to anticipate too much. They should be set up when there's a real need for them, not before, because generally you run into trouble, especially if there's any kind of a shift at all that takes place, when the organizational step is in advance of its real base.

Now, all the activities of the party contributed, as I said, to its growth. I believe the two greatest sources of growth then were the Militant work and the trade union activity. The Militant became a powerful force then and was recognized throughout the country as being one of the outstanding labor papers. As a result of all the various activities that I mentioned, it brought recruits to the party, and the growth was a dramatic one. Let me give you a few figures. In 1944 a goal was set for 180 new members, 10 for each of the Minneapolis victims. This was achieved, I think just barely. Interestingly enough, I have the figure on the age level of those recruits: it was 27 and a half years. As I said, the main recruits were of the older groups active in the union movement or active around the union movement. The youth movement as such was very quiet.

In the period of the most rapid growth, the '44-'46 period, as a result of the strike activity and everything else, the party grew by a thousand people in the two-year period. At the '46 convention, the same convention that passed the American theses, there was a political resolution that was passed entitled "From a Propaganda Group to a Party of Mass Action." It appeared that every indication was that we could continue expanding and reach out and become that very thing, a party of mass action. We saw both that growth and the possibility of a Labor Party as being possible and even a near possibility in the coming period. So the party at that convention set itself an objective of more and better campaigns and a goal of achieving, in the next few years, to become a party of 10,000 people. In fact, in California we projected the possibility of building a statewide organization of about 1,000 people, and it seemed quite reasonable at that time.

We didn't know, and it wasn't possible to tell at that time, that this was the high point. Because toward the end of 1946 came a lull in the union activity, combined with the Cold War and the beginnings of the witch hunt, that began to cut into the party and to reduce its size, its ranks and its activity. And that decline, of course, raised a host of new problems that would be worth discussing sometime, but it would be just too much to take now. So I would like to end right here and open up the floor for the questions or discussion on this.

Questions and discussion

Question: [Inaudible.] We could spend a little more time discussing the '46 convention, the speech, and the American theses, and the mood of that convention.

Chester: The material on that is contained in this pamphlet and is well worth reading. In these theses it was projected that the United States had a new world role of dominating the entire colonial scene, of playing the major deciding political role on the world scene, that it would reflect all the contradictions of capitalism on the world scene, all these resulting in this world role, and that this would inevitably have a political repercussion on the country and the development of a political struggle against capitalism at home here.

Now, combined with the whole experiences of that upsurge, Cannon's speech at that convention was a really high point. It's a shame that there weren't any tape recorders in existence in that day, because that speech should have been on record. The printing of it in this pamphlet doesn't even do justice to the real feeling that was expressed there. By the time he had finished, the convention was in such an uproar that it had to call a recess of about half an hour or an hour to calm down. Everybody came away from there ready to tackle the entire world, and it seemed as if it was on the order of the day also.

Now, I'm told that the last convention equaled it in size, but I believe that the party then, and whatever youth it had, was probably even bigger than it is now, and it was composed of people that had gone through a lot of picket lines, a lot of struggles, and were real militants. It was a very healthy situation and very optimistic. I could go into more details on the American theses, but I think it would be much better if you get the pamphlet, read it and read the speech.

Question: [Inaudible.] ... on what was the basis for that, and how was this thesis ever shown to be rejected or finally taken back?

Chester: Well, first of all, the party recognized quite clearly that the end of the Second World War wasn't the end. That's where that famous headline came out, "There Is No Peace." It came right with the end of the Second World War. The world role of US imperialism made it necessary for it to come face to face with the problem of the Soviet Union, and apparently in the period between '45 and '46, in the basic discussions taking place in the inner circles of capitalism, it was decided to launch the Cold War. This was done after they had housebroken the CPs in Europe and felt that they could stabilize Europe. So they instituted both the Marshall Plan on the economic front and the Cold War on the political front.

The Cold War was launched by Churchill, who was invited by Truman to come to the US to deliver his Iron Curtain speech. With that Iron Curtain speech came a really carefully laid out diplomatic attack on the Soviet Union, the setting up of NATO, the setting up of some 200 American bases around the world circling the Soviet Union, and the campaigns in all the European countries to get rid of the CP as a force. Especially the CP: in 1945 it could have taken over the French and Italian governments. They didn't. They formed a coalition government instead. And in 1946, 1947, they were forced out of these governments and then forced backwards.

So the entire campaign that started had its repercussion in this country in the witch hunt at home. And this whole drive against the Soviet Union, of course, the only end product would be to end up in a military conflict, and between '47 and '53 that was a very live possibility. The thing that stopped it was the development by the Soviet Union, in record time, of the atomic bomb, and consolidating its power in the central European countries, establishing a stalemate of fear, that's what it was, between the nuclear powers, which ended up in a readjustment. Now you see, part of this was an attempt in Korea to open up the offensive there, and this was stalemated. It's the first time that a colony of people fought back and kept the US at a standstill, which opened up a whole new problem for them, so they had to retrench. And Eisenhower established the peaceful coexistence line, and they established a different system. Up to that time they had what was called the Kennan Plan, which was essentially to isolate the Soviet Union in a progressive fashion and then force it back. Now, the Kennan Plan was, I think, thrown overboard in the middle '50s. But the possibility of war was considered as a very real thing all throughout that period.

Question: When Art spoke a couple of weeks back, he talked about a couple of unions, especially I think it was the [?] union and the [?], and he was working in the National Office. But you indicated there was a significant amount of recruitment directly from the unions. Did we recruit any people who were secondary union leadership or that took leadership roles in a number of the strike waves? What I'm trying to find out is exactly how the party related to the strike wave in '45, '46, other than using the Militant, which obviously is not on the ground.

Chester: Well, we had fractions operating in all the basic unions: in auto, steel, maritime, rubber, transportation, railroad and electrical fields, and we recruited right out of those plants. We had a national fraction in maritime, about 150 people. We had a national fraction in steel. I don't know what the size of it was. So we played significant roles inside of these unions. And the one thing that we were known for was that our caucuses stood for the Labor Party. We were known as Labor Party caucuses all over, I'd say. We carried on the fight on the militant scale on the economic front, so to speak, and then on the political thing on the

Question: Do we directly raise the transitional demands, the sliding scale of wages, et cetera?

Chester: Sure. In fact, our concept of the sliding scale was picked up by Reuther and converted a little bit into the escalator clause.

Question: I'd like to know more about this Bay Area Executive Committee that you said. I got the impression from what you were saying that it wasn't really indicated yet then, and I'd like to know what the indications would be for the formation of that kind of committee.

Chester: Well, I would say that the indication would be the development of several branches operating in a general area, needing to have a sort of an overall political body that could guide the major problems, and let the organizational problems stay in the branches. That would probably be the type of the organization. Now, we had only two branches, with the expectation probably of building more, but that was an expectation. I would say that it would be much better to have waited.

Now, I think one of the considerations that we had was to try and use the Bay Area exec as a means of helping out the Oakland growth, developing the Oakland branch, and that was part of the consideration. It didn't turn out quite that way. I know I spent a lot of time in Oakland during that period, but then it could have been worked out anyway, you see. It didn't need a Bay Area organization to do that. Now, in 1948 we opened up an internal fight in San Francisco, which actually was a premature preview of the Cochran fight. And a big point of attack on that was the Bay Area exec. It's unnecessary. Why have it? And that became a big organizational issue. It wasn't necessary, really. So generally, if you have the organizational need for an organization, it'll show itself very clearly.

Question: At the 1946 [?] convention, Cannon posed a resolution asking the party to begin an agitational campaign on the Labor Party slogan. At what point did we discontinue agitating for a labor party?

Chester: I believe it was after 1948, something like around 1949 to 1950, when it was quite obvious that the labor movement wasn't going to move and that it didn't have any of the dynamism that could develop into an attack. After the '48 elections there was still a possibility, but I believe once the war in Korea broke out, then everything clamped down very tight and we had to drop that slogan.

Question: But isn't it true that we resumed advocating around that slogan, and around the slogan of building a conference uniting the left trade union movement, between '50 and '54?

Chester: I believe we did do that, but it was on a propaganda level rather than the actual agitation level that it reached in '46, say. In '46 and '47 we actually began to enter resolutions into various unions saying the time is to build, the time is now, you see. Let's go and work on it. We introduced resolutions in a lot of areas. In fact, there was this famous AFL convention in San Francisco where John L. Lewis split with the AFL over the Taft-Hartley Act, and we had an ex-comrade in Santa Cruz who was able to introduce a resolution in the Santa Cruz Central Labor Council and then have that introduced on the floor of the AFL convention in 1947. This was quite typical of what we would do.

Now, in the auto workers, that was a standard thing. It came up every convention. The Labor Party resolution came from several of the locals that we had influence in. And Reuther used all his bag of tricks in diverting it. "The time is not now." That was the standard answer. In fact, they played a game there. Emil Mazey always said that he was for a Labor Party and would even try and negotiate with us. Behind the scenes he was stabbing us in the back and just using that as a means of trying to pacify us while Reuther conducted the main attack on it, you see. So it was part of the whole Reuther policy of playing with it, but then saying, okay, boys, it's right, it's necessary, but not now. And it happened every year.

Question: Just one last point. I remember looking through old Militants from about 1950-51, and I came across some editions in which we had banner headlines that said, "Build the Labor Party Now" [?], to fight against the courts [?].

Chester: Yes, but by that time it was more at the propaganda stage. The possibility of it happening was quite small then.

Question: I think it might be worthwhile if you explained the difference between the educational and propaganda use of the slogan [?] and the agitational.

Chester: Well, essentially the propaganda use is the educational use, where you try and convince people that it's necessary and get them interested in it through pamphlets, discussions and so on. Generally this is a preparatory stage for a future stage of more action. When it reaches that future stage, that's when you start the actual steps of pushing forward every way that you can. Now, there were a couple of ways that we did that. For example, in Los Angeles, through our influence, we were able to get labor candidates running in some of the small towns south of L.A. We plunged into those campaigns to try and get those candidates elected as a demonstration that it was possible. If we had succeeded effectively in any one of them, that would have become the example: say, if they did it there, why can't you do it here? And get organizations to push for that in those other areas. So the actual agitation of it meant the pushing for the actual steps rather than the educating for it as a general campaign.

Question: [Inaudible.] ... McCarthyism, an American fascism on the launch, right? It was after McCarthy's censure by the Senate, at which time it became evident that McCarthyism was not going to go as far as we originally considered it. Our use of the Labor Party slogan was used, as I remember, around this whole fight against McCarthyism, that the Labor Party was an answer to the fight against fascism. It was at the '54 convention that was held in Chicago, late in the winter, at which time we had a re-examination of our whole approach to McCarthyism. Prior to that we had had "Build a Labor Party" on the banner, and then we took it off after that, with the re-evaluation of McCarthyism.

Question: I'd like to just add a point to the end. When the reaction set in, the whole labor movement was pushed back, and the formerly militant union leadership became a part of the establishment, as it is said today, and became a hardened bureaucracy. You no longer have the militancy, you no longer have the democracy in the unions that existed before, you no longer have a truly viable labor movement, so the use of the slogan "Labor Party" became useless, because there was no means through which to use it inside the trade union movement. There's no point in calling for a labor party by a radical political organization standing outside the labor movement when we don't have people inside the trade unions, through their organs, to push for a labor party. We can't go out to a union and say, we suggest that you have a labor party, we stand for a labor party. They laugh at us, because who are we? We're not in the union movement.

If we're in the union movement and we can win people in the union movement over to that idea, just as it happened previously, where we had someone who was able to get a resolution passed by a trade union council, what's it called? A labor council. A labor council, and then bring it to the national convention. That's one thing. But to have a party member all by himself stand up and say, let's support a labor party, and everybody looks blankly or shrugs their shoulders, it becomes a useless thing. I might point out that you have a good example of this in the [?], who oppose the Labor Party right now as the answer to everything, and everybody looks at them as a bunch of kooks.

Chester: They don't understand the basic difference between propaganda and agitation, you see, because they confuse the two. They should realize that if they're in the educational period, they'll scale it around that instead of demanding it right now by everybody. It just doesn't make sense. You carefully explain to those people that you can try and build up the basis for it, and then after the political basis begins to be shown and the opportunities arise, then you start in the actual concrete work of trying to build for it. There are two different stages.

Question: Some of the members of the [?] think that the Labor Party slogan is a principle.

Chester: Yeah, well, that's true. The Labor Party essentially is a transitional program. We can't guarantee that there will be a Labor Party in this country. For all we know, events might move that fast and might even skip the Labor Party stage. We don't know. In fact, the longer any move in that direction is delayed, the more possibility there is of it leaping over that stage. So we consider that in the context of the general political movement rather than consider it as a principled basis or a principled step that has to be taken. The only reason that a Labor Party step is taken, essentially, is that you have a double combination in this country: a powerful labor movement, organized around its organizations that were militant in the '30s especially, and as a carryover into the '40s, and a very small radical movement, and the need for a political development on the part of the union movement was considered as a necessary step, and the Labor Party was considered as that kind of a vehicle. But essentially there isn't any law that says you have to have a Labor Party. You might jump right over that phase if conditions break and become radical fast enough in this country.

Question: What about other forms of independent political formations, like an independent black party, an independent Chicano party? Has there ever been any discussion in the party, this is sort of off the subject, but I'm interested, of the possibility of that stage being skipped as well?

Chester: Well, it depends on the circumstances. In the '30s the black movement was swung into the CIO movement. And if a Labor Party had formed around the CIO then, the blacks would have been right in the Labor Party. So it depends on the political circumstances. The one reason I would say that you have the possibility of a black party now and a Chicano party now is that you don't have the labor movement as a whole moving ahead and sucking them in with it as part of the general drive. So they're developing as independent drives.

Question: I think another thing is the political basis for the possibility of any kind of formation. Unlike the black and Chicano movements, the labor movement today doesn't have such a basis. There's not really any kind of movement of any big variety, nothing similar to what it was in the '30s. [Inaudible.] What's the left going to say?

Chester: Well, they don't understand a lot of things, but I'd say the major thing is that point. Any other questions?

Question: If you're building a black party, or a black party is being formed in a Chicano [?] party, is it possible to substitute that for, say, a mass radicalization in the working class, where the working people are moving? Are they separate? If you have a working-class radicalization, or the development of a black and brown party, could you have both?

Chester: I'd say that the development of a black party and a Chicano party will act as a catalyst to speed up the radicalization inside the working-class movement too. They don't have to substitute for each other and they can work together very well. There isn't any conflict there really, because the interests are basically against the capitalist system, their aims are. Now obviously if a black party begins to form and gains power, this acts as a real example to the labor movement and will be used as such. So the labor movement then will be able to say, anybody says, well, labor can't do it, well, if blacks can, why can't we? It becomes a very logical answer. And each one contributes really to the development of the other.

Question: It's hard to believe that some form or another of labor parties won't come on the scene, either instituted by unions or by various political groups and associations of unions. But it's not inconceivable, too, that there's a parallel phenomenon like you have in the student group now, where a lot of white radicals who readily identify with black and Chicano parties would, in fact, vote for those parties in elections. It's not inconceivable that there'd be a similar parallel with white workers, bearing in mind a certain ludicrous side of this support for the Black Panther Party or other black organizations that white students have. But another possibility is that the electoral projections of the SWP are also somewhat impressive as a result of our last [?] campaign. It's not excluded either that we may not play some of the very role at the bottom of the party, especially, as you say, as the process that the labor party is kept under lock and key [?] by the bureaucrats for so long, you may find a direct switchover, right? So at some point when we're running a campaign, a massive vote will turn out, elections that end up with a desire for independent political expression of both.

Chester: Let me put it this way: the party will expand its election campaign activity. That's obvious. As part of our whole effort, we will be trying to penetrate into the ranks of the working class as well as the other sections of the population. I can say this pretty clearly, that there won't be a Labor Party development in this country without our being one of the focal inspirers of it, and if that opportunity shows itself, there won't be any problem about us making that turn and plunging into it. But you see, it's up to the political developments themselves to decide these things.

The party's role in a Labor Party; trade union office

Question: I remember a meeting in which Cannon said there was some confusion about what our role would be in the Labor Party. I wonder if there was a much clearer policy of just how we would operate.

Chester: Well, the biggest probability is that we would be right inside of the Labor Party, building it, operating as its left wing, pushing for a radical program of the Labor Party. That's the biggest, the clearest variant, I would say. Now, you can't project every possibility here, but our role in the '40s was to act as the spokesman for the Labor Party development, on the basis that the working class needs its own party. We were the militant section there, pushing for a labor party to have a radical program. Our idea was that if it formed, even if it was on a reformist basis, we would be in there trying to change this program to a radical program and play the role of a left wing in that organization. That's essentially the role that the comrades in Canada have played. They were inside the New Democratic Party playing a role as much as they could, until some of them had been expelled; others have stayed in and keep on working now.

Question: That's the point I wasn't sure of: whether it was thought that it would be possible, through our efforts and [inaudible], for us to convert a Labor Party into a party capable of making the revolution, or whether we thought that instead it would be rather a section of the Fourth International doing it, different to us.

Chester: The best possible variant would be to convert the Labor Party into a Trotskyist party. That would be the best variant. It isn't excluded, depending on circumstances, but that isn't the most probable variant. The most probable variant is the development of a fairly strong reformist leadership, in which we would be in combat with it and carrying the struggle. Well, I think it's clear that our role in the unions still would be that of acting as the best exponent for Labor Party development. How far we would go in these situations would depend, I think, upon consultation with the national office, and that would be judged on the basis of what the local situation is to the national situation. But that's a rare case. Basically now all we do is propagandize for it.

Question: What is the party's position on comrades who are in the trade unions running for election to offices? And do we have any comrades who hold positions in trade unions above shop level, or even including shop level?

Chester: Well, I know that we do have some isolated cases here and there of comrades acting as shop stewards. That's generally a rare case, because in most situations the shop steward is caught right between the needs of the men on one side and the pressure of the bureaucracy on the other, and they get picked off. So it's a question of judging the specific circumstance, which is done with the consultation of the national office. Now, we have had in the past members who have been in posts in the movement. With the period of the McCarthyite pressure, all that disappeared. There isn't any real arbitrary rule that says that we can't run for office. It's possible in specific circumstances where the opportunities are such. And it might be possible that we might even win people to posts in the coming period, depending on circumstances, again. But I'm saying these become very complex and tricky questions. The basic problem is that we don't want to get our people in the position where they're out on a limb and can't operate and get caught short and get chopped out and out of the industry. That's pointless. It'd be much better to play a more cautious role and keep them in the industry for a better opportunity. But each case is different. You can't make a general rule on that.