Demand Jobs

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falling behind--and further behind--in their utility payments is growing. More and more the unemployed eligible for unemployment compensation have exhausted their benefits. And in this economic crisis the majority of the unemployed have received no such benefits. There is no federal or state or city jobs program that can put people back to work. The recent federal extension of unemployment benefits will reach only a few for a handful of weeks."

Campaign for Utilities as a Right The publicity generated by the November 10 speak-out resulted in an avalanche of phone calls to the MVUC office from people facing immediate shutoff or from families who had been living without heat or lights. Many had been living without utilities since the spring. Same had voluntarily asked that their utilities be turned off, choosing to use their limited income for mortgage payments or food.

A team in the MUC office helped callers-in prevent shutotis or helped work out negotiated settlements with various utility companies. Of those who phoned for help, many joined the MVUC Utilities Committee and circulated petitions to their friends and neighbors, asking the PUC to adopt a moratorium on utility shutoffs and establish a reconnect policy after payment of $50 or 5 percent of the back bill, whichever was less.

Even more difficult than preventing utility shutoffs is reconnecting lines already terminated. Utilities usually require full payment of the back bill plus a security deposit equal to two months' usage. Even when most of that money can be obtained by applying for benefits under a variety of public and private programs, families find it difficult to have services restored without a sizable amount of up-front cash--far beyond the reach of a family DNLAOFLPAY NEAPICAS DRO Unemployed demonstrate for jobs.

Members. of the MUC, along with representatives from other unemployed groups affiliated with the National Unemployed Network, were arrested last October in Washington, D.C., in a protest against Congress's refusal to pass unemployment legislation that would meet the needs of the unemployed. The 1,800-member committee has sponsored legislation, organized hearings, and taken direct action--whatever is necessary to demonstrate the determination of the unemployed workers to stand together and demand a decent life.

The committee is conscious of the power of united action and of its close ties to local unions--from which a large portion of its membership has been drawn. Like the unemployed movement of the 1930s, MVUC sees the need for a revitalized trade union movement that will forcefully take up the issues of the working class. By defending the most oppressed sectors of the working class--including the unemployed worker--the MVUC challenges the unions to defend the entire working class and reeducates the workers in the tradition of solidarity. C

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Why Socialist Action formed...

by the Editors Every new political group is obli gated to explain its origins and aims. This preview issue of our newspaper (we begin regular publication early next year) is to introduce ourselves to you, who we hope will become our regular readers. Socialist Action is a newspaper. It is also the name of a national organization founded at a conference in Chicago at the end of October 1983. It was initiated by a group of long-time socialists and activists in the antiwar, women's liberation, and union movements who had been expelled from the Socialist Workers Party in the course of the last two years.

We have taken this step because the SWP is in the process of abandoning the principles upon which it was founded. Denied the opportunity to reverse this course and forced outside the SWP, we in Socialist Action have no choice but to attempt, from the outside, to stop the degeneration of the SWP. We strive to be reintegrated into the SWP on the basis of the democratic rights traditionally guaranteed to party members. This includes our right to maintain our faction inside the SWP. In the meantime we continue to carry on the political and organizational work of the revolutionary party of socialist workers. The importance of the steps we are now taking can best be explained by placing them in the context of the historical development of the socialist movement in this country.

The Main Currents of Socialism in the United States The socialist movement arose in France in the 1790s. In the next hunworking class throughout Europe and created most of the European trade unions and mass workers' parties. By the turn of the century, it spread to the United States, Britain, and into the underdeveloped parts of the world. (In this country, the main line of the socialist movement evolved through the Socialist Labor Party of Daniel DeLeon to the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs. Debs, who also was widely known as a revolutionary leader of the early American union movement, helpea touna the first industry-wide union embracing all crafts--the American Railway For a century and a quarter the socialist movement was nothing more or less than the political organization of poor people against the rich, of the dispossessed against the privileged and powertul, of internationalists against every form of national chauvinism and racial hatred. Existing in countries where the political parties of wealthy set a standard of corruption and brutality toward their "inferiors," it should not be surprising that the less experienced political organizations poorly paid and poorly educated workers were themselves vulnerable to internal corruption of one kind or another. Most frequently they succumbed to control by entrenched bureaucratic leaderships that then imposed a conservative policy oi acceptance of the status quo in one form or another.

It is true that there are many smal and diverse socialist groups in the United States, but all of them trace their ancestry to three or four broad currents, the majority of which took shape in the period just before and after World War I, when external social pressures broke the workers' movement into rival tendencies.

The main world socialist organization Democracy. Democracy, had pledged itself to refuse at the turn of the century, thé Social to 'endorse the killing of workers one country by workers in another • for the benefit of the capitalist parties that controlled the governments Europe. But in World War I the pressure of wartime patriotism became too much for the cautious and conservatized 9 Socialist Action December 1983 social democratic leaderships, and each found its road to the military recruiter's office. From that point on, the socialist parties have been characterized by a policy of timia retorm, national patriotism against workers of other countries, and a fear of spontaneous revolutionary movements of the oppressed that would anger liberal politicians they sought to work with.

In Europe this current is represented by the West German Social Democrats, the British Labour Party, and Francois Mitterand's Socialist Party in France. These parties are supported by large numbers of workers, but try to keep their policies in framework of small-scale reform of the existing capitalist economic system. In the United States this current is represented by a right wing, the Social Democrats, USA and a left wing, the Democratic Socialists of America led by Michael Harrington.

It was in reaction to this nonrevolutionary form of socialism that Lenin, Irotsky, and the Russian Bolsheviks took the initiative in torming the international Communist movement after the 1917 revolution in Russia, the first place in the world where the workers succeeded in overthrowing the ruling rich and setting up a government based on workers' councils.

After an initial period of expansive popular democracy and worldwide support, the Russian Conmunist movement also fell prey to an internal degeneration. This took the form of a retreat from its democratic and internationalist perspectives into a concept national isolation. Conditions of extreme poverty and civil war, exacerbated by invading armies from the United States, France, and Britain, left the country devastated. A strata of careerist bureaucrats displaced the original Communists and created the Stalin tyranny, which then spread into Eastern Europe at the end of World War This bureaucratic Communist current, commanding the resources of an enormous nation, created a following for itself in countries throughout the world. It seemed to many workers, especially in Europe after the holocaust of Hitler and Mussolini, to represent at least a lesser evil to capitalism, if not a sort of "hardline" socialism that had discovered democracy to be too great a luxury in the era of capitalist world wars and fascist concentration camps. Of course, while a minority of workers were drawn to the Stalinists because of their power, much greater numbers drew away in revulsion at the privileges of the ruling strata and the thoughtcontrol repression of elementary democratic rights that was all too real in the Soviet bloc. In the United States the defenders of the Soviet bureaucracy have, since the 1920s, been gathered in the Communist Party, USA.

The Continuity of Revolutionary and Democratic Socialism The debacle of Russian Communism swamped the highly effective fusion of socialist democracy and revolutionary militancy pioneered by Lenin; but it did not erase it. A minority in the centers of Moscow and Leningrad and led of the 1917 revolt, fought a long rearguard action against the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Trotsky, who had been the leader of the Soviet Red Army in the civil war, formed a political bloc with Lenin to fight the bureaucratic menace during Lenin's last year of life. After Lenin's death, the pro-democratic wing of the Communist Party was crushed in Russia, and • in 1929 Trotsky was sent into exile.

In the ll years before he was assassinated by an agent of Stalin, Trotsky succeeded in founding an international organization of socialist revolutionaries. lhey differed from the Social Democrats in their cormitment to revolutionary means in the fight against a ruthless capitalist opponent; they differed from the stalinists in their carmitment to the defense of democracy as an essential component of socialism; and they sharply opposed both Social Democratic and | Stalinist policies of class collaboration. That organization was called the Fourth International (to distinguish it from the Social Democratic Second International, which still exists, and the now defunct Third International, which was controlled by the Stalinists from the mid1920s until its dissolution in 1943).

Though it is not a familiar name in the United States, the Fourth International, with which we are in poiltical solidarity, today has sections or sympathizing groups in more than 40 countries. It went through an important growth in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, today numbering more than 10,000 members, and is a small but well-known force in French, Spanish, British, Swedish, Mexican, Brazilian, and Peruvian politics.

China and Cuba

There are, of course, a number of new currents that have appeared on the American and international Left, mainly the late 1960s. Most significant were the various groups inspired by the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. Both of these revolutions demonstrated the capacity of ordinary people to build powerful movements to free themselves from foreign domination. (The Chinese revolution had taken place in 1949, but it was not until the 1960s, after China's political break from MOSCOW, that a distinct pro-China current appeared as a tendency on the Left.)

On their home ground there was a fundamental difference between the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. The Chinese Communist Party of Mao Tse-tung for many years had close ties with the Stalin dictatorship in the Soviet Union. As a consequence, the Chinese upheaval was a mixture of great advances and severe limitations. It freed China from foreign virtually eliminated unemployment illiteracy, provided the best health care for a country at its level of development in Asia, and made impressive strides in industrializing China's backward economy.

At the same time, however, the new Communist government granted large salaries and other privileges to its top functionaries. To protect its elite status, the party outlawed dissent and imprisoned thousands of its critics, of the Left as well as of the Right. In world attairs, the Chinese government, particularly in the last I7 years, since the beginning of Mao's Cultural Revolution, has sought a modus vivendi with washington and has given reactionary aid to many right-wing governments, including Pinochet's Chile, in hopes of ingratiating itself with the American ruling class. Supporters of the Chinese position in Europe and the United States have been quite diverse, including many serious revolutionaries who have made a contribution to many movements of social protest despite their retrograde positions on other questions.

The Cuban revolution was the first successful socialist revolution after the rise of Stalinism to free itself from the methods and social st ucture of the bureaucratized Soviet

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...Who we are, what we stand for The team around Fidel Castro has for almost 25 years resisted the creation of a privileged elite, retained and broadened attitude toward dissent, although with important limitations the creation of democratic institutions. Moreover, it has been a consistent and effective fighter against imperialist domination throughout the world. The Cubans have played a particularly exemplary role in working to unify the revolutionary forces in Central America and the Caribbean, and in their political defense of pro-socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the ongoing revolution in El Salvador.

Socialist Action is deeply committed to working with others in a campaign in the United States to stop the Reagan government's brutal counterrevolutionary war against Nicaragua and El Salvador and to stay its hand from its implicit threats to invade Cuba. Over and above that elementary duty for all defenders of national sovereignty, seek common work and close relations with the revolutionaries of Cuba and Central America.

At the same time, our appraisal of some important world events different from theirs. Most significant is our assessment of the character of the Soviet government and its allied regimes in Eastern Europe. This is posed most sharply over Poland, where believe that Solidarnose, the nowoutlawed mass union organization of the Polish working class, is the legitimate representative of Polish people while the Jaruzelski dictatorship is not. The Cuban Communist Party at this time offers critical support to the Polish Communist Party against Solidarnosc.

It is understandable that the and heroic fighters of Cuba, living under continual threat of invasion and destruction by Washington and dependent on what aid the cautious functionaries in the Kremlin are willing to provide, have chosen to accept the existing Soviet leadership as an ally. Nevertheless we believe that some of the positions they have taken as a consequence of that alliance are seriously wrong. Moreover, we are not in their precarious situation, so it would be even more wrong for us to adopt these positions.

We have an obligation not only to the Cuban revolution, but also to the workers of Poland. We must strongly and forthrightly defend them from the pressions of the Kremlin puppet regime. Ihis dual responsibility is one of the major issues that came into dispute within the SWP, where the present party leadership decided that its hope establish friendly relations with revolutionists in Central America could best be served by moving as close as possible to sharing their current attitude toward the Soviet Union and the Polish government. We, as well as the great majority of the Fourth International, sharply disagreed.

The History of the SWP The movement that became the Socialist Workers Party was founded in 1928 by a small group of leaders of the Communist Party, led by James P. Cannon, who chose to follow Trotsky in the fight with the the Stalin bureaucracy. After their expulsion, they too formed a public faction of the CP, becoming a separate political party only after the CP had irretrievably moved from revolutionary positions. In the 1930s the new organization led a number of important battles of the U.S. labor movement, most notably the teamster general strikes in Minneapolis in 1934. It participated in building' the CIO unions in the late 1930s and in the post-World War II labor strike wave. Eighteen leaders of the SWP and of the Teamsters Union in Minneapolis were railroaded to jail for a year at the beginning of World War II for their militant unionism and their socialist objections to placing confidence in the American ruling class's objectives in the war. Iwo of the four of those who remained in the SWP were expel led in 1982, and one of them, Jake Coop et, is a member of the National Conmit tee of Socialist Action.

In the 1950s the SWP, although reduced to a small isolated group by the anticommunist witch-hunt, put up an effective fight for civil libert ies against cne mccartnyite witcn-nunters• Its best-known victory was a many-year national campaign by Jimmy Kutcher, a legless World War II veteran fired by the thought-controllers from his clerical job at the Veterans Administration for his socialist ideas. His campaign for' reinstatement won the endorsement of unions numbering millions of members and was championed by such well-known civil libertarians as I. F. Stone. Kutcher succeeded in getting his job back and setting a precedent that saved the jobs of many others whose views the government disapproved of. This year Jimmy Kutcher fell victim to a purge in his own party. • In the 1960s the SWP was one of the first organizations on the Left to campaign for the construction of a mass, nonexclusive coalition to oppose the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Its representatives became leaders of the National Mobilization Cormittee to End the War in Vietnam, and of its youth affiliate, the Student Mobilization Conmittee. These committees were instrumental in calling demonstrations in Washington, San Francisco, and New York in which as many as a million North Americans participated at one time (November 1969). Many of us in Socialist Action took part in building those actions, which we are convinced helped to persuade the American people to oppose the war, isolated the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and saved the lives of many draftees and many of the heroic people of Vietnam.

A Dispute Over Perspectives for U.S. Marxists It not our intention in future issues of Socialist Action to dwell on differences with the Socialist Workers Party. Nevertheless, an account of the political dispute as it concerns major issues on which all sections oi the Left have taken and must take positions can only help to define our own trajectory as well as that of the SWP. Even after some years of rapid decline in membership, the SWP remains one of the four or five largest organizations of the U.S. Left, and its experience in seeking to build a party of committed revolutionists should have interest to everyone engaged in a similar enterprise.

Inmediately following the August 1981 party convention--the last that will be held before next summer, a year overdue--a sharp dispute erupted in the sWP over three issues. These proved to have some relationship: our assessment of Trotsky's Marxism; our attitude toward capitalist and Stalinist governments in conflict with imperialism but simultaneously engaged in political repression within their own borders; and our willingness to participate in and build formations such as the women's, antinuclear, and antiwar movememajority of the party's ranks were as well as the unions, of which members.

Marx and Engels, the founders of the modern socialist and communist movements, originally posed the idea of a socialist reorganization of society as a possibility only for relatively industrialized countries. They reasoned that without large-scale industry, national planning would be impossible.

curther. small farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans would be against nationalization of their workplaces, while factory workers, who did not own the factories previously, would be in favor nationalization as a means to take control from private capitalists. Hence, without a majority of workers in population there seemed to be no basis for any substantial government ownership on which the planned developproduction for human needs could rest.

early years of the 20th century, large revolutionary movements arose in many under-developed countries. This posed for the first time the question of whether revolutions in primarily peasant nations could move relatively swiftly to socialist nationalizations the beginnings of planned economies, would have to retain private ownership whether industry with its consequent drainoff of resources into the pockets of a wealthy minority.

was the Russian Marxist movement that first began to discuss this quesseriously, around the time of the 1905 Russian revolution. Leon Trotsky was the first of the Russian Marxists propose the possibility of a lution against the tsar that would set an openly socialist government. This was the essence of his famous "theory permanent revolution. that time virtually the entire Marxist movement doubted the possibility of La course. Even Lenin, the greatest of the Russian Marxists, disagreed with Trotsky's idea. Later, 1917, Lenin concluded independently nothing short socialist government could solve Russia's problems. His thinking in effect convergea that of Trotsky's in the period leading up to the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917.

Afterward, during the rise of Stalin, conservative bureaucracy sought to discredit its opponents on the Left by slandering Trotsky and working to discredit all of his ideas, including that of permanent revolution. Although this really an attack on Lenin as well, it fit in with the general retreat by the Stalinists from any serious attempt to organize revolutionary movements. In place of the struggle for socialism, they called for broad antiimperialist ments that in practice provegfovern- antifascist movements and enough to leave the power in the hands of the liberal capitalist parties. The usual consequence was the defeat of revolutionary mass mobilizations through their failure to take decisive action in a period of revolutionary crisis.

Inmediately after the party •convention in 1981, with no possibility for anyone who disagreed to reply, Jack Barnes, the SWP's central leader, announced that he no longer accepted the of fighting for a directly socialist revolution in underdeveloped countries. This led in the summer of 1983 to the publication of a special issue of the SWP's theoretical magazine,New International, in which Barnes insisted that "our movement must discard permanent revolution" (p. 13).

To reject one of the fundamental ideas of the organization in a public magazine, without ever having allowed a discussion of it, was a gross violation the democratic rights of the party membership.

Politically, many party members were convinced that this break with the strategy of Lenin and Trotsky marked a serious adaptation to Stalinist ideology. Many of the same arguments used Stalin in the 1920s against the Leninist Opposition in the Soviet Communist Party were used by the SWP leadership, in this magazine and other articles, to attack the party's Continued on page 8

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Why Socialist Action formed Continued from page 7 own previous • positions, which it had held for more than 50 years. In 1982 supporters of Trotskyist ideology and supporters of the Fourth Internati onal began to be expelled from the SWP on a variety of organizational pretexts.

Poland and Iran

On December 13, 1981, martial law was declared in Poland and the Stalinist government began the decapitation of the 10-million member Solidarnose union led by Lech Walesa. In 1968 at the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the SWP had participated in joint demonstrations and protest meetings with other groups on the Left. The same was true of all the organizations of the Fourth International. At that time the Trotskyists sought to exclude from such protests anticommunists or groups that not have a record of forthright opposition to the crimes of capitalist governments, such as the U.S. war Vietnam.

1981 it was clear the SWP did not want to be too prominent in support of the Polish workers--this might enbarrass the party in its relationship with revolutionaries in Central America who not agree with this policy. This time the SWP rejected demonstrations of any kind, refused to participate virtually all meetings of the Left to support Solidarnose, and held only few pro forma meetings of its own.

The SWP's program since 1935 has been to designate the Soviet bureaucracy as something less than a new ruling class, nevertheless unreformable. official position is "political revolution," that is, to state that the restoration of workers' democracy is possible only through the removal bureaucrats by revolutionary means while preserving the social advances made possible through the property nationalizations. Shortly after the beginning of 1982, this concept also virtually disappeared from The Militant, the newspaper reflecting the SWP's viewpoint. In its place ambiguous formulas appeared that could interpreted as calling merely for the reform of the Polish CP.

similar course was followed in the SWP's coverage of Iran. After bitter struggle between the Khomeini regime and Mujahedeen began in the fall 1981, the Swp's press refused for many months to defend any victims of repression in Iran, whether they Mujahedeen supporters who had fought the government or innocent bystanders. The SWP advanced a general argument it served the aims of reaction to criticize, from within an imperialist country, governments under attack by imperialism. The consequence of stance was self-censorship. Universally known facts about torture of every variety of dissenter in Iranian prisons, military assaults Kurdish national minority areas, use of as Trotsky used to say when pressured to make similar adaptations and not criticize the Stalin regime because the capitalist press would use it, that "only the truth is revolutionary." We think the SWP is profoundly mistaken in the approach it has recently adopted in covering world news. Its aim is to protect the victims of imperialism by not mentioning some unsavory facts that are being exploited by the imperialists. The result will be that no one will believe its version of international events.

For Common Work Against Our Common Foe The SWP has patently been going through a dramatic internal transformation over the last two years. Its leaders explain it as an effort to draw ever closer to the revolutionaries of Cuba and Central America, on the one hand, and to root the party more deeply ın the industrial working class, on the other hand, through the extensive colindustiy. Ofe betleve bat andi ferent industry. process has been taking place.

Since the last party convention, the SWP has publicly renounced the most basic ideas of the Trotskyist movement, of which it was a leading part for half a century. This momentous decision was never put up for a vote or even discussed, and this in a party that had a long and highly respected democratic tradition. A purge has been launched against supporters of the Fourth International and of Trotskyisin in the party, and they are being sys tematically expelled. The majority of the Fourth International has become alarmed this development. At the October meeting of world organzation's leading body, the united Secretariat, an overwhelming majority characterized the wave of expulsions from the SWP as political purge aimed at the International and recognized the right of those expelled to form new ganization that would have all rights of fraternal collaboration with the world organzation permitted by reactionary U.S. laws - the same status held by the SWP.

Such sharp twists and turns and the driving out of much of the older generation of the party coula be accomcialist propaganda work with individual workers. Because this is not oriented around actual issues that appear in workers' lives or around the organizations they belong to now, such work has proven ineffectual and has won very few members to the party.

We are for a sharp break from this policy of self-isolation. We regret that many good people in an organization to which we devoted many years have worked themselves into such a corner. We have a special concern here because while we are no longer members of the . SWP, both we and the swp are sympathizers of the same world movement. Moreover, it is a movement in which our perspective holds strong majority, although the relationship of forces is reversed here in the United States. We would like to see all supporters of the Fourth International in the United States belong to a single organization. To express that idea we have decided to organize ourselves as public faction of the SWP, since it is the larger of the two groups in this country that are in solldarity with the Fourth International. Organizing ourselves as a public faction expresses our • hope that the party will restore its prior democratic norms, readmit the expelled as a body, and discussion of the wrong political line it has embarked on in the last two years.

We hope to work with all others, including the SWP, who want to engage in real struggles against the masters our society. Although we are beginning La small organization, from the outset we have cormitted ourselves to participate as fully as we are able in the central fights of our day. issue of Socialist Action are working the Greyhound strikers across the country. Many of our members were organizers of the November 12 demonstrations in solidarity with the peoples of Central America and the Caribbean.

Monongahela Valley of southwestern Pennsylvanta we are participating in the movement of the unemployed. Reagan mobilizes the ultraright and the raw power of the Marines, our responsibilities become more pressing: Every organization the Left must tribute what it can to bring to bear counterpower of the U.S. working class. We think that can best be done today through broad struggle coalitions the ones being built around opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America. We are also convinced that only a national • organization linked to a world movement, with a disciplined membership, a press, and an overall strategy, can hope to have effect events that change their focus from day to day and from city to city. That is why we have chosen to carry out our work through Socialist Action. We hope that many of you will join us. O

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