Art LeClair: A Memory

By Joe Auciello / July 2007 issue of Socialist Action newspaper

After a long illness, socialist veteran and trade unionist Art LeClair, 55, succumbed last month to cancer.

Art was a young rail worker from the South Boston projects when he joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) almost 30 years ago. Soon, he was the party’s candidate for lieutenant governor.

Though he was relatively new to the socialist movement, Art was a forceful and articulate speaker who sarcastically highlighted the hypocrisies and stupidities of bourgeois politics that Massachusetts politicians so abundantly provided.

As the SWP leadership abandoned the Trotskyist program in the early 1980s, Art became friendly with and later joined the oppositional trend in the party. He was a founding member of the Boston branch of Socialist Action (SA).

He continued to work at Amtrak throughout his life and served as chairman of his International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local. Art formed part of SA’s trade-union cadre, contributing especially to support for the P-9 union struggle against the Hormel company.

A few years ago, Art and others left SA to found the Socialist Workers Organization, which published Socialist Viewpoint. Art was a member of the magazine’s editorial board and contributed articles on trade-union struggles.

I knew Art for many years when we were both members of the SWP and SA. Later, political disagreements, sometimes quite sharp, unfortunately caused us to lose touch. I always expected our political paths would merge someday and our friendship would resume, but now, of course, it is too late.

Art was a curious combination: a rough-and-tumble person with a warm and sensitive heart. He could quarrel harshly with you in a branch debate but readily buy you a beer afterwards and talk together as if nothing had happened. In this inconsistency, Art was simply being true to himself.

One memory, in particular, says a great deal about Art. During the early 1980s in the SWP, a time of intense factional hostility within that organization, Art was assigned to write an article for the party’s newspaper. He asked me for help with editing, which I was glad to provide. I also made some suggestions, and Art asked me to add some paragraphs.

When Art brought the completed article to the branch leadership, he had given me a by-line. But this was considered unacceptable. I was a part of the despised minority and could not be allowed to make a positive contribution. The point, after all, was to drive the minority out of the SWP, not encourage their cooperation and collaboration.

So, my name had to go. Art refused. We wrote the article together, he said, so we should co-sign it, and faction fights be damned. The article was finally printed as Art wanted, but his political career in the SWP was pretty much over.

Art was neither naive nor foolish. He knew what trouble he would cause by his stand in this conflict, and he went ahead anyway. Truth, self-respect, integrity all meant much more to him than fitting in by knuckling under to pressure. Had he been that weak a person, he would never have joined a revolutionary socialist organization in the first place.

Art dedicated his life to socialism. In hard times he remained loyal to the struggle for a better world. In the future, that struggle will be joined by many young men and women who will also be motivated by the same hopes and combative spirit that brought us such a friend and comrade as Art LeClair.