The future of humanity depends on building a leadership, a party, that can mobilize the working class in our millions to take state power away from the capitalist rulers and place it into our own hands, to start down the road to a socialist revolution. This will open the door to ending the exploitation and oppression inherent in capitalist rule worldwide.
The U.S. today is a capitalist dictatorship, a deeply class-divided society ruled over by the bosses, their political parties and their government, backed by a bloated layer of upper-middle-class hangers-on. There can be no proposals that can unite us. The politicians of both the Democratic and Republican parties claim to speak for working families, but working people increasingly recognize this isn’t true.
The Socialist Workers Party puts forward a program to organize and build a powerful union movement for working people to join together to fight for the things we need — wages and hours that enable us to raise our families with a decent place to live, safe working conditions so we can make it home in one piece, government-funded all-embracing health care, child care and elder care, and more. Hundreds of thousands of workers and their unions, from auto, rail, truckers, flight attendants, nurses and others are fighting for demands that point in this direction.
Well over a half million workers will see their union contracts expire this year, from postal workers to dockworkers, teachers and grocery clerks. And they are willing to fight after years of losing ground.
Inspired by last year’s auto strikes, workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama, have signed up to join the United Auto Workers union. Their fight deserves the solidarity of all working people. The company says this is not the right time, and this is not the right way, says autoworker Jeremy Kimbrell, but the thing is “this is our decision.”
That statement expresses a widespread willingness to fight among working people today. We are human beings who can take action to shape our future. We can organize society without exploitation and oppression. Workers’ solidarity can overcome the ways the capitalists divide us for profit by fighting to end two-tier contracts, life-sucking “suicide” schedules and women’s second-class status. Amnesty for immigrant workers in the U.S. would allow them the right to work without fear of deportation and open the door to unifying the working class. Organize all workers!
The mounting pressure by the Joseph Biden administration and other imperialist powers to impose a long-term cease-fire on Israel, putting on ice its battle to destroy the military capacity of Hamas, ignores the avowed intentions of this reactionary group — to continue to kill Jews and destroy the state of Israel....
....convergence of the left with fascist forces is described well by painter Diego Rivera when he visited Germany in 1928, in his book My Art, My Life: An Autobiography.
As Israeli forces advance in Gaza and as more Arabs speak out against the reactionary bourgeois Islamist group, supporters and apologists for Hamas in the U.S. and around the world are becoming more thuggish and more openly antisemitic.
So-called supporters of Palestine picketed and passed out leaflets outside a Feb. 14 comedy show in New York that was raising funds for victims of Oct. 7. The leaflets charged that “all ‘Israelis’ are settlers and partake in the risks associated to stealing land and resources” — in other words, Jews who live or visit there, from babies to the elderly, are fair game for murder and rape by Hamas.
“No matter where they are, they shall not know peace,” the leaflet threatened at the end. “May we teach them a lesson they won’t soon forget.”
Their encouragement of Jew-hating violence should be rejected and condemned by all working people, religious groups and the unions.
Some individuals and groups who condemn Hamas for its bloody anti-Jewish pogrom and massacre of 1,200 people Oct. 7 are now backing the call by Hamas apologists for a cease-fire, which would allow the Islamist outfit to survive and slaughter Jews again.
Can't Israel and Hamas negotiate an end to the conflict? Wouldn't the war end if Israel would just agree to a Palestinian state side by side with Israel?
After waging a war against supporters of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas ruled Gaza — a de facto Palestinian state — for almost two decades. It busted unions, arrested and tortured political opponents, and denied women equal rights. It ran the state, in its own words, as "cover" to prepare assaults on Israel.
Hamas, which is trained, financed, and aided in planning its assaults by the reactionary regime in Tehran, is not interested in negotiations for two states....
"....Every time the capitalist government assaults the rights of anyone, including a capitalist politician like Trump, it sets a precedent for the same and far worse being done to the working class and vanguard fighters like the Socialist Workers Party."
[....] The Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction-era 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, and other constitutional freedoms were adopted in the course of struggles by the toiling population. They provide protections against government interference with personal beliefs, political activity and union-organizing that workers use today.
Whenever workers strike for better wages or fight dangerous working conditions and life-draining schedules we use these freedoms. They’re utilized when workers organize union solidarity, join actions opposing Jew-hatred or oppose Washington’s wars abroad. These freedoms are needed more than ever as the economic, social and moral crises of capitalism deepen today, making more workers open to discussing why we need to act independently of the bosses and their two main parties, the Democrats and Republicans.
Defense of constitutional protections is a key part of the course presented by Socialist Workers Party candidates in 2024, as they join in the fight to unify the working class in action and present a road to fight for workers to take political power into our own hands....
Supporters of the Socialist Workers Party here have been campaigning with a statement by Naomi Craine, SWP candidate for U.S. Congress, titled, “Amnesty for all undocumented workers! Fight for jobs for all workers! Build the unions to unite the working class!”
“Newly arrived immigrants are pitted against workers who already face a lack of jobs, affordable housing, decent schools and other needs,” Craine says. “The fight for jobs and unity among workers to cut across these divisions is a life-and-death question for the unions.
“The Socialist Workers Party campaigns for the unions to lead a fight for amnesty for all workers who are here, so that we’re in a stronger position to fight together,” she says. “The unions must lead a fight to demand a government-funded public works program to put unemployed workers to work building housing, schools, clinics and other facilities workers need.”
Jew-hate has been the default setting for the dictatorship of capital for hundreds of years. At each new turn for a nation's bourgeoisie, antisemitism is employed in a different way, but always with the same goal: scapegoating Jews to thwart the working class achieving essential class clarity as to its real enemy. JR
“The Council of People’s Commissars declares that the anti-Semitic movement and pogroms against Jews are fatal to the interests of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution,” said V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the Bolshevik Party and the 1917 Russian Revolution, in a government declaration after workers conquered power.
It instructed “all Soviet deputies to take uncompromising measures to tear the anti-Semitic movement out by the roots.”
The Bolsheviks meant what they said.
They put an end to the pogroms and persecution against Jews that had been widespread under the dictatorial rule of the czars. Russia was home to the world’s largest Jewish population. Gramophone recordings of Lenin’s speeches against Jew-hatred were sent all across the country to spread the message.
The revolutionary government integrated Jews into all aspects of social and political life, and Jewish culture flourished in the 1920s. They took part in the mighty battles to defend the revolution against the reactionary armies of the former landowners and capitalists along with the invading armies of 14 imperialist powers. In the midst of this struggle the Red Army put an end to pogroms these forces carried out.
These blows to Jew-hatred and advances in the lives of the Jews were reversed a few years later, part of a thoroughgoing counterrevolution against Lenin’s program and policies carried out by privileged layers in the state bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin.
The Stalinist regime sought to drive working people out of political life, murdered the leaders of the 1917 revolution and reimposed the czarist prison house of nations across Russia. An inevitable consequence was the resurrection of Jew-hatred. The Stalinist reign of terror was wielded with special vengeance against Leon Trotsky and other defenders of Lenin’s revolutionary course. Stalin used appeals to Jew-hatred to target any who questioned his power.
When Bolshevik leaders Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev united with Trotsky to oppose the Stalinist regime in 1927, the regime’s use of antisemitism accelerated. All three were Jewish. “Jews, even when unreservedly devoted to the general line [of Stalin] were removed from responsible party and Soviet posts,” Trotsky wrote. In Moscow’s factories, “agitators spoke brazenly: ‘The Jews are rioting.’”
“The country of the great proletarian revolution is now passing through a period of profound reaction,” Trotsky pointed out in a 1937 interview. Stalin seeks “to direct especially against the Jews the existing discontent against the bureaucracy....”
[....] The petty-bourgeois intellectual, who wants to teach and guide the labor movement without participating in it, feels only loose ties to the party and is always full of “grievances” against it. The moment his toes are stepped on, or he is rebuffed, he forgets all about the interests of the movement and remembers only that his feelings have been hurt; the revolution may be important, but the wounded vanity of a petty-bourgeois intellectual is more important. He is all for discipline when he is laying down the law to others, but as soon as he finds himself in a minority, he begins to deliver ultimatums and threats of split to the party majority.
The leaders of the opposition are running true to type. Having recited the whole dolorous catalogue of their petty and inconsequential and mostly imaginary grievances; having been repulsed by the proletarian majority in their attempt to revise the program; having been called in sociological and political terms by their right names — having “suffered” all these indignities — the leaders of the opposition are now attempting to revenge themselves upon the party majority by threats of split. That will not help them. It will not prevent us from characterizing their revisionist improvisations, and showing that their attitude on the organization question is not disconnected from their petty-bourgeois conceptions in general, but simply a secondary expression of them.
Organization questions and organizational methods are not independent of political lines, but subordinate to them. As a rule, the organizational methods flow from the political line. Indeed, the whole significance of organization is to realize a political program. In the final analysis there are no exceptions to this rule. It is not the organization — the party or group — which creates the program; rather it is the program that creates the organization, or conquers and utilizes an existing one. Even those unprincipled groups and cliques which have no program or banner of their own, cannot fail to have a political program imposed upon them in the course of a struggle.
[....] Biden insists Israel agree to withdraw all its troops from Gaza in exchange for Hamas releasing the remaining hostages. And that Israel accept a “two-state solution”: a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank alongside Israel. But Hamas and Tehran want the destruction of Israel and the Jews, and have no interest whatsoever in two states.
In a Jan. 16 interview with a Kuwaiti reporter, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal insisted they will continue to fight to conquer the entire region, “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” He also said their 17-year rule over Gaza was “political and administrative cover” to amass weapons, dig tunnels and prepare for attacks on Jews in Israel....
[....] the world can never go back to the way it was before the Hamas pogrom.
Today Washington is being drawn more deeply into conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere as it seeks to protect its weakened but still dominant place in an increasingly unstable imperialist world “order,” and advance its own economic and political interests. The U.S. rulers wield unmatched military power and have shown a willingness to use it from Vietnam to Iraq.
The root of Israel’s war to defeat Hamas lies in facing the expansionist course of the bourgeois clerical regime in Iran. Over decades Tehran has backed militias based among Shiite Muslims in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen to advance its interests against all rivals, and to pursue its goal of eliminating Israel and the Jews....
[....] the “threat of an expanded conflagration” is posed by Tehran’s “declared aim of eliminating the State of Israel, home to nearly half the world’s Jews.” The most important curb to this danger is Iran’s working people of all nationalities who have been protesting for years “in defiance of the regime and all its wings.”
Teamsters Local 544 Union Defense Guard in 1938. Showing road for workers toward taking power, unionists across Minneapolis-St. Paul area swelled its ranks to block mobilization of employer-funded strikebreakers, fascist thugs.
We have analyzed fascism as it developed, throughout the various stages of its development, and advanced to the forefront now one, now another of its aspects. There is an element of Bonapartism in fascism. Without this element, namely, without the raising of state power above society owing to an extreme sharpening of the class struggle, fascism would have been impossible. But we pointed out from the very beginning that it was primarily a question of Bonapartism of the epoch of imperialist decline, which is qualitatively different from Bonapartism of the epoch of bourgeois rise. At the next stage we distinguished pure Bonapartism as the prologue to a fascist regime. …
Insofar as the proletariat proves incapable at a given stage of conquering power, imperialism begins regulating economic life with its own methods; the political mechanism is the fascist party, which becomes the state power. The productive forces are in irreconcilable contradiction not only with private property but also with national boundaries. Imperialism is the very expression of this contradiction. Imperialist capitalism seeks to solve this contradiction through an extension of boundaries, seizure of new territories, and so on. The totalitarian state, subjecting all aspects of economic, political, and cultural life to finance capital, is the instrument for creating a supranationalist state, an imperialist empire, ruling over continents, ruling over the whole world.
All these traits of fascism we have analyzed each one by itself and all of them in their totality to the extent that they became manifest or came to the forefront.
Both theoretical analysis and the rich historical experience of the last quarter of a century have demonstrated with equal force that fascism is each time the final link of a specific political cycle composed of the following: the gravest crisis of capitalist society; the growth of the radicalization of the working class; the growth of sympathy toward the working class and a yearning for change on the part of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie; the extreme confusion of the big bourgeoisie; its cowardly and treacherous maneuvers aimed at avoiding the revolutionary climax; the exhaustion of the proletariat; growing confusion and indifference; the aggravation of the social crisis; the despair of the petty bourgeoisie, its yearning for change; the collective neurosis of the petty bourgeoisie, its readiness to believe in miracles, its readiness for violent measures; the growth of hostility towards the proletariat which has deceived its expectations. These are the premises for a swift formation of a fascist party and its victory.
It is quite self-evident that the radicalization of the working class in the United States has passed only through its initial phases, almost exclusively in the sphere of the trade-union movement (the CIO). … The problem of forming an independent labor party will be put on the order of the day. Our transitional demands will gain great popularity. On the other hand, the fascist, reactionary tendencies will withdraw to the background, assuming a defensive position, awaiting a more favorable moment. … It is necessary to utilize the opportunities which are opening up and to build the revolutionary party. …
The old conservative tradition of the democratic state, which was so powerful even during the era of the last imperialist war, exists today only as an extremely unstable survival. On the eve of the last war the European workers had numerically powerful parties. But on the order of the day were put reforms, partial conquests, and not at all the conquest of power.
The American working class is still without a mass labor party even today. But the objective situation and the experience accumulated by the American workers can within a very brief period of time place on the order of the day the question of the conquest of power. This perspective must be made the basis of our agitation. It is not merely a question of a position on capitalist militarism and of renouncing the defense of the bourgeois state but of directly preparing for the conquest of power. …
The irreconcilability of the struggle waged by Marx, Engels, and Lenin against opportunism on the one side and anarchism on the other demonstrates that they did not at all underestimate this danger. In what did it consist? In this, that the opportunism of the summits of the working class, subject to the bourgeoisie’s influence, could obstruct, slow down, make more difficult, postpone the fulfillment of the revolutionary task of the proletariat. It is precisely this condition of society that we are now observing. Fascism did not at all come “instead” of socialism. Fascism is the continuation of capitalism, an attempt to perpetuate its existence by means of the most bestial and monstrous measures. Capitalism obtained an opportunity to resort to fascism only because the proletariat did not accomplish the socialist revolution in time. The proletariat was paralyzed in the fulfillment of its task by the opportunist parties. …
We may set it down as an historical law: fascism was able to conquer only in those countries where the conservative labor parties prevented the proletariat from utilizing the revolutionary situation and seizing power. In Germany, two revolutionary situations were involved: 1918-1919 and 1923-24. Even in 1929 a direct struggle for power on the part of the proletariat was still possible. In all these three cases the Social Democracy and the Comintern criminally and viciously disrupted the conquest of power and thereby placed society in an impasse. Only under these conditions and in this situation did the stormy rise of fascism and its gaining of power prove possible.
....The working class is the backbone of Ukraine’s production and defense today.
Claiming the unions are wracked with corruption, and taking advantage of wartime martial law that bans strikes and protests, the government is moving to seize the FPU’s properties.
To carry this through, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ruling party is trying to replace state consultative bodies that include union representation with a bogus “Confederation of Trade Unions” it has created, led by Serhiy Kaplin, a bourgeois politician and former candidate for president. Kaplin is campaigning to carry through the seizure of the FPU properties.
Making a thinly veiled threat, Kaplin told openDemocracy that war veterans could be used to “restore order” and remove “corrupt” union leaders. The key prize in this property fight is Kyiv’s Trade Unions House, which was at the center of the Maidan popular uprising a decade ago that brought down the pro-Moscow regime of Viktor Yanukovych, advancing the struggle for Ukrainian independence. It was gutted by fire Feb. 19, 2014, amid murderous assaults by Yanukovych’s riot police on protesters taking shelter there.
Over the next five years the building was fully restored with the help of unions all over the world. It continues to house a number of national unions.
The FPU says that by the end of 2022 most buildings under its auspices were used for people displaced by the war.
Susan Sontag's speech last month proved to be quite a media event.
A prominent critic and essayist known for her radicalism in the Vietnam War period, Sontag was a featured speaker at a February 6 meeting in New York City's Town Hall in support of Poland's Solidarity.
The event was publicized as a forum for radical intellectuals and unionists who wanted to speak out against the Polish crackdown without aiding President Reagan's demagogic exploitation of the issue.
Sontag took the occasion to deliver a virulent anticommunist speech and to assert that she and other radicals had been dupes of communism.
Time magazine devoted two-thirds of a page to Sontag's conversion.
The New York Times provided an extensive report of the meeting. It published a second article recounting the debate her speech sparked in intellectual circles.
The New York Post, an anticommunist gutter rag, ran a story on the meeting with a block-type headline pegged to her speech: "Communism== Fascism."
The Los Angeles Times reprinted her speech on its Op Ed page.
The Washington Post did an extensive feature on the debate around Sontag's speech.
A San Francisco Chronicle editorial welcomed her to the anticommunist fold.
In his syndicated column, right-winger William Buckley saluted her "courage."
Liberal anticommunist columnist James Wechsler wondered "where she had been so long."
The New York Village Voice devoted a number of articles to the speech.
The Soho News, a liberal weekly, ran the text of her speech. (Sontag initiated a damage suit because they did so without her permission.) The paper followed up with responses to the speech from academic and literary figures here and abroad.
The Nation magazine also ran Sontag's speech with permission and followed up with a similar symposium.
Why did Sontag's declaration of her conversion to anticommunism create such a media stir?
The right moment
For one thing, it came at a moment when the anticommunist campaign in this country around Poland was flagging. It was a few weeks after the government-sponsored "Let Poland Be Poland" extravaganza, which went over like the proverbial lead balloon. ,
And it had the added value of being the first such declaration by a significant intellectual figure in a good many years. It's obviously hoped that the Sontag stand will help speed up other liberal and radical intellectuals currently on a rightward course.
One might wonder how Sontag happened to be on the platform at the Town Hall meeting.
In a March 2 Village Voice article, Ralph Schoenman, principal organizer of the rally, said he felt "particularly aggrieved" because he had invited Sontag to speak. And he had explained to her that the meeting was being organized because it was "essential for the left to take up the cause of the Polish workers . . . and, above all, to deny to cold warriors the support of a workers' mass movement in Poland, which they would be the first to crush in the U.S."
Sontag, Schoenman said, declared her "full support for this approach." And, he added, there was "no intimation" that she intended to deliver her anticommunist tirade.
That may be. But Schoenman did know in advance about another anticommunist who was given the platform at the meeting.
In the same article, Schoenman describes his discussion with Joseph Brodsky, a right-wing Soviet dissident. Despite the declared left-wing purpose of the meeting, Brodsky had been invited to speak.
This exception was made, Schoenman explains, because Brodsky had been "supportive" of individual Polish exiles.
Brodsky, in discussing the program, demanded to know why "those ridiculous PATCO people" had been invited.
He accused Schoenman of wanting to have "liberal chestbeaters and fellow travelers up here."
Schoenman reports that his response to Brodsky was: "Don't feel obligated. You should only come if you feel that this is a place you want to be and a program with which you are comfortable."
Schoenman doesn't say why he didn't simply withdraw the invitation.
Forget El Salvador
In his speech at the meeting, Brodsky expressed irritation with those who spoke of Reagan's dirty war in El Salvador. The main issue, Brodsky advised, is containing the Soviet Union. He called on Reagan to impose a trade embargo on Poland.
Regarding Schoenman's aggrieved surprise at Sontag's performance, a certain skepticism is in order.
Sontag and Schoenman have known each other for years. Was he really totally oblivious of her political evolution?
Was he unaware that her latest book, Under the Sign of Saturn, is dedicated to Joseph Brodsky?
The invitations to Sontag and Brodsky, in the name of an undefined "unity of the left" against Stalinist repression, signified a substantial adaptation to the right.
Certainly there were worthwhile things said at the Town Hall meeting. Gregory Pardlo from the air traffic controllers and other unionists effectively exposed union-buster Reagan's crocodile tears for Solidarity. Paul Robeson, Jr., pointed to Solidarity's struggle as confirming that socialism and democracy were inseparable. Pete Seeger spoke in a similar vein.
But insofar as the public impact of the meeting was concerned, all this was drowned out by the media's almost total focus on Sontag's reactionary speech.
The propaganda blitz developed around the Sontag speech makes it obligatory for left opponents of her reactionary ideas to analyze and rebut them.
At Town Hall, Sontag insisted that she agreed with the purpose of the meeting. And she did attack Reagan as a union buster and the puppet master of the Salvadoran dictatorship.
But her attack on Reagan in relation to Poland like that of her friend Brodsky was from the right, not the left.
Like Brodsky, she flayed the "Western governments" that is the imperialist governments for continuing to refinance Polish bank loans and for not cutting off grain sales to the Soviet Union.
"That," Sontag bitterly declared, "is the kind of retaliating the Western democracies are prepared to make for the enslavement of Poland."
What kind of "retaliating" does Sontag favor?
An economic blockade of Poland and the Soviet Union by the Reagan-led "democracies"? Will that aid the Polish workers' struggle, or simply compound their difficulties?
And if such a blockade failed to end their "enslavement," what next? Military retaliation?
Defending her thesis that "Communism is fascism," Sontag declared that the entire left is corrupt and bankrupt. Not just those on the leftand they are not just a fewwho closed their eyes to the crimes of Stalinism or tried to justify them. But even those who did not.
"We tried to distinguish among communisms," Sontag declared, "for example treating Stalipism, which we disavowed, as if it were an aberration."
To buttress her claim that communism equals fascism, Sontag argued, "The similarities between the Polish military junta and the right-wing dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and other South American countries are obvious."
Putting aside the question of whether the repressive regimes in South America are military dictatorships or fascist regimes, Sontag here displayed a total lack of comprehension of what fascism or communism actually is.
For Marxists, it is essential to distinguish as precisely as possible between differing social systems and differing states and governments. It's not a matter of semantics, or idle theoretical speculation. Such criteria are indispensable if you're determined to help change the world. You have to know what you're fighting for and what you're fighting against how to fight effectively for what you want and against what you don't want.
The key to this problem, for Marxists, is a materialist analysis, a class analysis. This is totally absent from Sontag's approach.
For example, there are currently repressive regimes in Argentina and Poland. But in Argentina you have capitalism. In Poland you don't.
In Poland capitalism was overturned following World War II, and a workers state a bureaucratically deformed one replaced it.
A class difference
So the difference between Argentina and Poland is substantial. In Argentina, the military discharges its responsibility of preserving capitalism. It is in step with the capitalist class.
In Poland, the privileged bureaucrac: is a major obstacle to the advancemen of the workers state towards socialism Its interests conflict with those of th• workers.
Those looking at it superficially will argue, "But what's the difference? Th« workers have no rights in Poland or Argentina."
That's like arguing there's no difference between slavery and wage labor.
The capitalist exploitation of wage Ia bor is intense. And in many cases i means the most brutal repression fo: the workers. Yet, as counterposed tc slavery, or feudalism, capitalism repre sented an historic advance for humani ty.
The same holds true for the countrie· of the world where capitalism has beer abolishedthe Soviet Union, the coun tries of Eastern Europe, China, Nort Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba.
That is the case even though Cuba the only one of these countries whert workers democracy prevails.
Fascism equals communism, declares Sontag.
Nothing could be further from the reality. Fascism, which arose in it classic form in Italy and Germany, rep resents the total crisis of capitalism am the manipulation by fascist demagoguE* of a socially disoriented middle class a a battering ram against the organizet working class.
In that sense, fascism is also different from military dictatorships that are imposed when capitalism cannot "afford' democracy. Fascism is a far deeper form of repression because, at least in its first period, it maintains power not simply with a military club, but with a mass-based counterrevolutionary movement. What base?
Can anyone seriously argue that the regime in Poland has a mass base? It rules primarily by armed force, and even that would be insufficient if it were not backed by the.potential use of Soviet troops.
And, not only is communism not equal to fascism, but what you have in Poland is not communism. Genuine communism a classless society of cooperative producers remains humanity's great liberating goal. We have yet to achieve anywhere even a socialist society, which Marx described as a society of economic superabundance where conflicting class antagonisms have been reduced to a minimum and the state is in the process of withering away.
Poland is a workers state. That is, it is a state where the principal means of production are no longer privately owned, where there is planned production, not production for profit.
But Poland is obviously not a healthy workers state. From the outset the Polish revolution has been dominated by Kremin-sponsored bureaucrats who utilize their positions of power to ensure tl:iemselves substantial material privilege in the midst of general scarcity. Because they are a parasitic drain on the economy and incompetent bureaucratic mismanagers to bootthey cannot abide workers democracy. That's why they have fought Solidarity so savagely.
And because the bureaucrats' political rule is so costly and oppressive, the Polish workers and farmers can be relied on to continue the struggle by any means necessary. The battle in Poland is far from over.
The Polish workers are not struggling against "communism." They are fighting to democratize a bureaucratically deformed workers state.
There may be varying degrees of political consciousness among the Polish workers varying degrees of Marxist understanding, if you will but they are not fighting for the restoration of capitalism.
Waiting for GM?
The workers at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, the militant miners in Silesia, the Polish· workers as a whole, are not looking for the arrival of capitalists to take over their nationalized enterprises. They want to take control of them and run them themselves democratically.
In short, despite the present setback, the Polish workers are in the process of making a political revolution. That is, the logic of their movement is to overthrow the bureaucratic regime in Warsaw and replace it with democratic institutions of the workers.
The term political revolution is key. It distinguishes the process from the kind of revolution needed in capitalist countries, that is, a social revolution to eliminate private ownership of industry.
Sontag's failure to grasp such a class, or Marxist, approach to the political revolution in Poland stems, not from a nonclass approach, but from an anti-working-class approach.
Sontag not only despises Poland's bureaucratic hacks. She fears and despises the Polish working class as well.
In her response to critics in the February 27 Nation, she bitterly declares:
"Neither the ruling elites nor the enslaved and disaffected people of Eastern Europe can be called Marxist'; and if and when these oppressed manage to overthrow their tyrants, it will not, I fear, be to embrace an alternative of our liking.
"What is brewing in Eastern Europe is not democratic socialism. The centrality of a particularly fervent Catholicism to Solidarity is not an accident or an instance of cultural lag; and, in Russia, among those who are not cynics or merely demoralized, new converts to religious fundamentalism outnumber the liberals and democratic socialists a thousand to one . . . .
"Is it now proved that we have been wrong to be hopeful that out of Communism something much better might emerge? Yes, it is now proved. We were wrong. It is the people who live in those countries who tell us that."
So much for Sontag's solidarity with Solidarity.
Response to Sontag
But what of her critics? I speak here of those who responded to her in the pages of the Nation and Soho News.
These include a range of intellectual figures and political writers, some radical, some quasi-radical, and some liberal. Plus there are others who speak in the name ofliberalism or even socialism but in actuality postulate unadulterated, right-wing anticommunism.
Daniel Singer, a Polish writer now resident in Paris, makes a particularly cogent point in the Nation symposium. He notes that Susan Sontag, Leonid Brezhnev, Polish General Jaruzelski, and Reagan all agree on one point - that what you have today in Poland is "communism." And, Singer adds, "They apparently also agree that there can be no other Communism than that."
He caustically adds, "Her [Sontag] other catchy definition, fascism with a human face' was obviously meant for stubborn suckers like myself who refuse to swallow the cheap, fashionable equation between Marx and the barbed wire."
Singer's point is buttressed by the historical fact of Marx's political work, as well as his writing. And by the fact that Stalinism was able to come to power in the Soviet Unionand then imposed elsewhere only on the basis of mortal struggle against genuine communists.
A slashing rejoinder to Sontag is off€red in the Soho News by Columbia University Prof. Edward Said, a Palestinian.
Said observes that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to respond first of all to "what is closest to them," U.S. policy. Otherwise, he declares, "they become willing agents of the state, legitimizers of its policies."
"Above all," Said declares, "it is not for intellectuals to be amateur national security advisers, certifiers of patriotism, or unpaid voices of America."
Solidarity with Palestinians
He concretizes that stern admonition by citing the horrendous crimes of the Washington-sponsored Israeli regime against the Palestinian people.
"So far as I know," Said wrote, "no right-thinking group of prominent American intellectuals has met at Town Hall to protest the denial of Palestinian rights."
Is it too much to say, he inquires, that Poland's "present misery has been the occasion for much hypocrisy and bad faith?"
Unfortunately such voices as those of Said and Singer are a distinct minority in the Nation-Soho News symposia. Several other contributors reject Sontag's equation of communism and fascism but offer few cogent arguments against her.
Others - writer Diana Trilling and Nation editorial board member Aryeh Neier chided Sontag for tardiness in joining the ranks of the "democratic" anticommunists.
With some of the contributors, the line is a more hard-nosed anticommunism.
"The situation in Poland alarms me more than the one in El Salvador," worries Prof. Julia Kristeva.
Ben Wattenberg, coeditor of Public Opinion, opines that such regimes as the one in El Salvador may not be as free as "we would wish," but, "do any of those nations target their missiles on America? Are they really as unfree as the Soviet-style totalitarian countries? If you're harassed in Chile these days you can leave, but can you leave if you're harassed in Russia?"
Welcoming Sontag to the anticommunist ranks, Prof. Seymour Martin Lipset also once a radical advises of the need "to recognize that Western society, including the United States, is more humane, more progressive . . . than any and all of the regimes that call themselves communist.
"Those who seek utopias," Lipset warns, "are the true villains."
Another disgusting contribution to the discussion was provided by Christopher Hitchens, a contributing editor of the Nation.
Good anticommunism
Hitchens assures that he sees no sign that Sontag has moved "noticeably" to the irrational anticommunism of "the bad old days."
He adds that people can defend the Polish workers "without any throat clearing about El Salvador."
He says: "Surely I am not the only socialist who finds comparisons between Solidarity and the fate of PATCO to be grotesque? The rights of highly paid Reaganite air controllers may have been violated, but the rights of Polish coal miners and shipbuilders have been abolished." (Emphasis in original.)
I would submit that Hitchens is as much a socialist as General Jaruzelski is a communist.
Someone who is unwilling to even "clear his throat" for the Salvadoran rebels and PATCO strikers has no moral or political claim to being a socialist. At the same time, such people are a deadly obstacle in the fight against Stalinism.
Stalinism can be fully comprehended only in the context of the international class strugglethe fight of the world's workers and peasants against capitalism and imperialism.
The whole thrust of world history today is away from capitalism and towards socialism. The rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and its damaging effects, there and elsewhere, was a product of defeats and setbacks for the world working class. The problem of Stalinism will find a progressive resolution only in the context of the fight against capitalism and for socialism.
In explaining the political degeneration that occurred in the Soviet Union with the rise of Stalinism, Leon Trotsky, a central leader of the Russian revolution, likened the revolutionary process to a trade union that had achieved state power.
And, with the emergence of Stalinism, he likened the process to the bureaucratization of a previously healthy union with a class struggle perspective.
Such bureaucrats, he explained, do a terrible disservice to the unions. They not only supress democracy in order to protect their privileged positions, but they work consciously to achieve a status quo relationship with the employers.
The bureaucrats recognize that the ranks of a union which fights militantly to preserve and extend its gains is not likely to tolerate for long a conservative, parasitic bureaucracy.
Antibureaucratic strategy
The question is posed for members of bureaucratically dominated unions, how can we get rid of these hacks who loot the union treasury, deny the members a voice, and make sellout deals with the employers?
Point number one, of course, for serious unionists, is to conduct the fight in such a way that it gives no aid or comfort to the employers, nor to their mock concern about labor bureaucratism, which they use to discredit unionism.
Point number two is that the bureaucrats can be fought effectively only in the context of deepening the fight against the employers. Those who aren't ready to take on the bosses will hardly be effective against people who are essentially the bosses' agents within the union.
When rank-and-file unionists are locked in combat with a bureaucratic gang, all partisans of militant, democratic unionism will rally behind them.
But these workers don't need help from people who are antiunion, who advise that unionism is the root of the problem, that bureaucratism is an "inherent" feature of unionism.
Nor do workers need the help ofliberals who assure that they're very much prounion, but simply concerned that maybe there's a problem of "big labor" vs. big capital; and who maybe believe it is a bit utopian to think that ordinary workers can take control of their unions and give the bosses a run for their money.
Similarly with the fight against Stalinism, it takes consistent, revolutionary socialists to fight that bureaucratic monstrosity without giving an inch to the capitalist rulers and their politicians.
In this connection, it is interesting to note that the organizers of the Town Hall meeting rejected a request from the Socialist Workers Party for a speaker at the meeting.
This although the SWP stands in full solidarity with the Polish workers and has fought Stalinism from its inception without ever compromising with capitalism.
Poor excuse
The explanation given was rather thin there would be no representatives of organizations on the platform. That may have been the formality, but the views of such organizations as the reformist Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee were presented at the meeting.
[....] In the pages of the Nation, Susan Sontag brands the song, "The Internationale," as "the anthem of the oppressive state." She says she was glad the Polish workers didn't sing it and hoped the Salvadoran liberation fighters wouldn't either.
Sontag is as wrong on that as she is on everything else. Stalinist regimes may offer formal claim to the song, but they choke on its call for the revolutionary solidarity of the oppressed of the world.
Today, whether Sontag likes it or not, "The Internationale" is being sung by increasing numbers of those fighting for a new and better world. And for good reason. It is, and remains, the only way forward. In good time, the Polish workers, those of El Salvador, and yes, the U.S. workers, will together sing, "We have been naught, we shall be all."
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