The Wind That Shakes The Barley

Socialist Resistance held a public meeting on The Wind That Shakes the Barley, yesterday, October 30th.
Paul Laverty was the speaker. It was a small meeting but the audience were enthralled by paul's presentation of some of the key parts of the film.

Mike

Reason in Revolt

An alternative to the Big Bang: "The universe had no beginning and will have no end."

By Alan Woods
Tuesday, 30 April 2002




The publication of Reason in Revolt seven years ago was greeted with enthusiasm by many people, not only on the left, but by scientists and other people interested in philosophy and the latest scientific theories, such as chaos and complexity, which in many respects reflect a dialectical approach to nature.
The latest discoveries of palaeontology, in particular the pioneering work of Stephen J Gould (punctuated equilibria) have fundamentally modified the old view of evolution as a slow, gradual process, uninterrupted by sudden catastrophes and leaps. Gould himself has paid tribute to the contribution of Engels, who, in his little masterpiece The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, brilliantly anticipated the latest discoveries in the investigation of human origins.
Since the book first appeared, there have been a number of other spectacular advances in science - notably the human genome. These results have completely demolished the positions of genetic determinism that we criticised in Reason in Revolt. They have also dealt a mortal blow to the nonsense of the Creationists who want to reject Darwinism in favour of the first chapters of Genesis. It has cut the ground from under the feet of the racists who attempted to enlist the service of genetics to peddle their reactionary pseudo-scientific "theories".
However, there was one part of Reason in Revolt that some found rather hard to digest - namely the section on cosmology, where we argued against the theory of the Big Bang. The standard model of the universe seemed to be so entrenched that it was apparently unassailable. The overwhelming majority accepted it uncritically. To call it into question was almost as unthinkable as the Pope in Rome questioning the Immaculate Conception.
The Big Bang theory was an attempt to explain the history of the universe on the basis of certain observed phenomena, in particular the fact that we can see the galaxies receding from each other. Because of this, most astronomers believe that these star groupings were closer together in the past. If we run the film backwards then all matter, space and time would have erupted from a point in a massive explosion, involving staggering amounts of energy.
In the most widely accepted cosmological model, called the inflationary model, the universe was born in an instantaneous creation of matter and energy. It is the modern equivalent of the old religious dogma of the creation of the world from nothing. The Big Bang is alleged to be the beginning of space, matter and time. As the universe has inflated since that event, matter and energy have spread out in clumps. The spreading could potentially continue forever.
This model has gained widespread acceptance because it accounts for several important features we see in the universe - such as why everything looks the same in all directions and the fact that the cosmos appears "flat" (parallel lines would never meet however long).
"The inflation idea has been tremendously influential," notes Robert P. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University. "No observation's been found that proves it wrong." But, he added, "that does not, of course, mean that it's right." (National Geographic News, April 25, 2002)
In fact, there are serious problems with this theory, which we outlined in detail in Reason in Revolt. In particular, questions about what happened "before" the Big Bang cannot really be asked because there is supposed to have been "no before" - since there was no time. In this way, an absolute limitation is placed on the possibility of our understanding the universe, thus leaving the door wide open for all kinds of mystical ideas - which have been pouring out in vast quantities in recent years. Nevertheless, the inflationary theory has survived since it was introduced in the late 1970s, while cosmologists have discarded competing ideas one by one.
However, new problems with the existing theory were becoming apparent all the time. The latest was in 1998, when studies of distant, exploding stars showed the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate. This was a big surprise, since most researchers believed that either the universe would expand forever at the same rate or else slow down and contract, eventually coming back together in a "Big Crunch".
In the last week, a report by Paul J. Steinhardt and his colleague Neil Turok of Cambridge University posted on April 25 on the website of the prestigious journal Science, has thrown down a serious challenge to the accepted wisdom. The two scientists have put forward a new model to explain how the cosmos is and where it might be going. They argue - as we did in Reason in Revolt - that the universe had no beginning and it will have no end.
Steinhardt and Turok point out that the standard model has several shortcomings. It cannot tell us what happened before the Big Bang or explain the eventual fate of the universe. Will it expand forever or stop and contract? These were some of the objections we raised in Reason in Revolt.
They propose that the cosmos goes through an endless cycle - of Big Bang, expansion and stagnation - driven by (an as yet unexplained) "dark energy". They argue that it is necessary to take account of recent discoveries that have surprised the scientific community - such as the observation that everything in the universe is moving apart at an accelerating rate. The apparent acceleration has since been checked and shown to be real. The standard model certainly did not predict such features!
To explain this, astronomers invoked an old idea that space contains a so-called dark energy that is pushing the galaxies apart. Steinhardt and Turok have put this energy - a scalar field as they mathematically describe it - at the centre of their new model. They think the dark energy drives a cycle of activity that includes a big bang and a subsequent period of expansion that leaves the universe smooth, empty and flat.
The new model offers a streamlined alternative to the standard model. It treats the big bang not as the moment of creation, but as a transition between two cycles in an endless process of cosmological rebirth. According to the model, the big bang is followed by a period of slow expansion and gradual accumulation of dark energy. As dark energy becomes dominant, it stimulates cosmic acceleration. The current era is near the transition between these stages, the authors maintain.
At present, they argue, the universe is in an expansionary phase, and the current expansion will go on for trillions of years, before reaching a critical point where the process takes a new direction. Although there are many questions still to be answered (in particular the question of this hypothetical "dark energy"), the new model seems to be a vast improvement on the existing one, which states that the Big Bang was the beginning of time, matter, space and energy - clearly a mystical and unscientific conception. The new theory does away with the idea that the universe has either a beginning or an end - it is infinite in both time and space.
Steinhardt adds: "In the standard picture, it's presumed that the Big Bang is actually a beginning of space and time; that there was nothingness, and then suddenly out of nothingness there sprang space, time, matter, radiation, etc."
Although the standard model has proved difficult to dislodge, many scientists were already becoming troubled about its contradictions and inconsistencies. According to Steinhardt, the new theory "predicts all the features of the standard model, using fewer ingredients." In fact, several features of the cosmos can be better explained by the cyclic model, including the geometry of the universe, its overall uniformity, and in particular, the existence of acceleration. The authors of the report have discussed their ideas with other scientists and have received a positive, but "cautious", response.
The new model is yet another example of the dialectical law of the transformation of quantity into quality. "The scalar field changes its character over time," Paul Steinhardt told the BBC. "Finally, the field begins to build up energy to a point where it suddenly becomes unstable and bursts into matter and radiation, filling the universe, and driving the next period of expansion."
We are dealing here with unimaginably vast periods of time. As accelerated expansion proceeds over trillions of years, matter and energy are gradually stretched thin across the universe. Eventually, matter, radiation, and even black holes become so stretched out that they are dissipated to almost nothing, leaving behind a massive universe that is virtually empty.
"At this point in the cycle, particles of matter are so far apart - and moving away from each other so rapidly - that they cannot interact and are effectively separated into distinct universes. Steinhardt and Turok call this vacuum-like stage the "big crunch". The vacuum triggers dark energy to materialize into matter and radiation in another Big Bang, refreshing the cycle of expansion." (National Geographic News, April 25, 2002)
This model puts an end to the nonsense of the creation of the universe from nothing:
"What we're proposing in this new picture is that the Big Bang is not a beginning of time but really just the latest in an infinite series of cycles, in which the universe has gone through periods of heating, expanding, cooling, stagnating, emptying, and then re-expanding again." (BBC report)
The picture of the universe presented here is one that is entirely consistent with the theories of dialectical materialism, which state that the universe is infinite, eternal, and ever changing. This does not at all preclude the possibility of a big bang. Indeed, we have already argued that there have probably been many big bangs. But what it certainly does preclude is any question of matter (or energy, which is exactly the same thing) can be created out of nothing (as the Big Bang theory implies) or destroyed.
It is, of course, extraordinarily difficult to solve the kind of problems posed by an infinite universe. Cosmology writer Marcus Chown concedes it will be extremely difficult to finally prove any model of the universe. He is refreshingly honest about the problems involved: "The history of cosmology is the history of us being completely wrong," he told the BBC. "I mean, cosmology is the hardest of all sciences; we sit on this tiny planet in the middle of this vast universe, we can't go anywhere and do any experiments - all we can do is pick up the light that happens to fall on us and deduce some things about the universe."
Yet despite this, scientists continue to probe the secrets of the universe and nature, wresting one result after another. The whole history of science is the history of humanity's advance from ignorance to knowledge, from error to the truth. This is itself a dialectical process, where each generation arrives at a theory that explains many things. But at a certain point, small irregularities are found that contradict the accepted model. This eventually leads to its overthrow and replacement by a new model, which will itself eventually be surpassed.
In this way, human knowledge penetrates deeper and deeper into the secrets of the universe. And this process is never-ending. The day will never dawn when humanity will be able to say: "We now understand everything." The universe is infinite, and so is the process of human understanding, which inevitably proceeds through a whole series of errors, or, more correctly, partial truths.
The new theory must, of course, be demonstrated through observation. There are ways in which this can be done. For example, gravitational waves, a feature of the universe predicted by general relativity, would take a different form in these two models. There would not be long-wavelength gravitational waves in a cyclic universe, whereas there would be in an inflationary universe.
Thus, measurements of gravitational waves and the properties of "dark energy" can provide decisive ways to discriminate between the two pictures observationally. Efforts are underway to measure and characterise gravitational waves, but it will likely take at least several years to gather useful data. The Planck satellite, which is scheduled to be launched by the European Space Agency around 2008 may help settle the question.
It is too early to say whether it will be verified in detail. However, what is clear is that the deficiencies of the Big Bang theory are now becoming clear, and the search is on for an alternative. Whether or not the present theory is correct in its detail, the method that its authors have used - a materialist and dialectical method - is obviously correct. And, as they correctly write in Science: "The ultimate arbiter will be Nature."

Barry Sheppard's memoir, The Party. An interested, critical review

Barry Sheppard's memoir, The Party. An interested, critical review
By Bob Gould

The Party. The Socialist Workers Party, 1960-1988.
Volume 1: The Sixties, a political memoir
Resistance Books, Sydney, 2005

This is a book of considerable interest on the history of the revolutionary socialist movement, and it's of particular interest to me because Barry Sheppard and I crossed paths at an important time. As well, the US SWP, of which he was a leading figure, had some influence on my political development and a lot of influence on the evolution of the revolutionary socialist movement in Australia.

Sheppard's memoir has the same name as Trevor Griffith's interesting and illuminating play, The Party, essentially a playwright's portrait of Gerry Healy.

I find in reading Sheppard's memoir that we are roughly the same age. We were both born in the awful year, 1937, which Victor Serge dubbed "midnight in the century".

I'm interested to read that Sheppard subscribed to Dorothy Day's US Catholic Worker, as part of his political development, which I also subscribed to from Australia as a young leftward-moving Catholic in the labour movement.

Sheppard is in a pretty unusual position for someone of our generation, as he met both Max Shachtman and James P. Cannon in the course of his political development. He started out in the socialist movement as a supporter of Shachtman's bureaucratic collectivist theory of the nature of the USSR. He shares that unusual experience with Tim Wohlforth, James Robertson and probably Fred Mazelis.

His description of his political formation in the US is interesting. Larry Trainor, the working-class Trotskyist in Boston, who was one of his mentors, gave him C.L.R. James's World Revolution 1917-36 to read. That book also had some influence on me.

Sheppard's description of the evolution of the US Young Socialist Alliance, of which he was a founding member, parallels, from his point of view, the experience of the pseudonymous Workers League person (possibly Tim Wohlforth or Fred Mazelis) who wrote a pamphlet, The YSA: How it Began on the early years of the YSA. (Another interesting account of the same period is the memoir, Fragments of the Century of the left-wing Social Democrat, the late Michael Harrington.)

I used to have that pamphlet, but I seem to have lost it. It doesn't seem to be on the web, and if anyone on Marxmail knows how I can get hold of a copy of it, I'd be grateful for the advice.

Sheppard's book is a straight up and down account of his political experiences, and the evolution of the SWP in the first 10 years or so of his involvement. There's very little in it that Jack Barnes and the modern US SWP could object to as a history of their current, and it will be interesting to see how they react.

Sheppard describes the factional alignments in the SWP. He rapidly became a Farrell Dobbs supporter, rather than a supporter of Murry and Myra Tanner Weiss, or even an adherent of James P. Cannon in the period of his retirement.

He even gently chides Cannon for incipient factionalism against the leadership of the SWP after Cannon retired to California. He strongly defends the 1965 organisational resolution of the SWP that put almost impossible constraints on the formation of factions unless allowed by the leadership, saying it was a product of the fact that the younger members wanted a campaigning party that wasn't held back by a continuing stew of discussion.

He tends to dismiss Cannon's very public, although late in the piece, misgivings. Cannon pleaded for tolerance of discussion inside the SWP in three letters and a talk, later published with an introduction by SWP veteran George Breitman as Don't Strangle the Party.

In the subsequent evolution of the US SWP, the very stringent, Zinovievist rules of organisation adopted in 1965 turned out to be a structural form that accelerated the transformation of the US SWP, the Australian DSP and the New Zealand Socialist Action League into the monochrome sects that they have become.

As a participant, Sheppard defends this militarise-the-party resolution vehemently, and it was within that framework that he became an international political operator and enforcer on behalf of the Barnes leadership of the SWP until he fell out with Barnes in the last couple of years of his membership of the SWP.

It will be interesting to see how Sheppard handles the degeneration of the US SWP in his second volume. He was a vigorous participant in the elimination of all the oppositions in the US SWP up to his own departure.

Sheppard's book is quite absorbing. It's a bit on the dry side, almost laconic, a bit like Sheppard himself, but it's relatively calm and careful, unlike the hysterical memoir written by John Percy on the history of Australian DSP current, which was launched simultaneously with Sheppard's book at the Asia-Pacific Solidarity conference over Easter 2005. Sheppard's book is not entirely objective, but it's his memoir, and it's naive to automatically expect total objectivity from a participant.

The book's biases are, however, not allowed to prevent at least some account of the views of people or currents with which Sheppard had been in conflict. It's not as comprehensive on the development of the Vietnam antiwar movement as Fred Halsted's book, Out Now, but as a memoir it doesn't have to be.

As a revolutionary socialist and secretary of the Vietnam Action Committee in Australia, I used to follow pretty carefully the lead of the US SWP through the Bring the Troops Home Now newsletter and later material.

In Australia we weren't quite as legalistic as the US SWP and we didn't completely avoid all acts of civil disobedience, as the US SWP tended to do. Nevertheless, we closely followed the general lead of the US SWP in the antiwar movement, and the impact of this in Australia, in my view, was almost entirely positive.

We had, in Australia, however, a considerable advantage for our agitation in the fact that, broadly speaking, the whole of the official labour movement, particularly the courageous Labor Party parliamentary leader Arthur Calwell, strongly opposed sending Australian troops to Vietnam, and called for their withdrawal. The fact that some of us, particularly me, had a bit of a niche in the Labor Party was of great advantage to us, an advantage not shared by the US SWP.

The useful influence on us of the US SWP was considerable when our contact was entirely through SWP literature, and we were trying to do something similar in Australia. When our contact with the US SWP became more direct, however, with Barry Sheppard's visit to Australia in 1969, the situation changed.

When Sheppard arrived here on a kind of fact-finding mission on behalf of the US SWP leadership, it clearly emerged later that he was casing the joint, politically speaking. While paying ritual obeisance to the proposition that the SWP didn't interfere too much, it's absolutely clear from the references to Australia and New Zealand in his book that the objective was to find likely types who would model themselves totally on the US SWP and push aside unassimilable old Trotskyists such as Bob Gould and Hector MacNeill, who were perceived as standing in the way of the US SWP's political project.

At that stage, the US SWP's aim was clearly to establish organisations in English-speaking countries in its own rather authoritarian, ultra-Cannonist image, and which would also bow to the leadership of the mother party, the US SWP. For a while that worked in Australia, but it came to grief later, with the sharpest possible personal conflict for hegemony between Jack Barnes in the US and Jim Percy in Australia.

Sheppard writes of his 1965 visit:


"I had written to Bob Gould, the only Australian who had recent contact with the Fourth International, and I was expecting him to meet me. I was looking around the airport waiting room for someone who looked like they were looking around for someone. I noticed that there was a group of hippie-ish young people who seemed to be milling around. When all the other passengers had left, I was alone with them. Finally, I walked over to a young man with a red beard and asked him if he was looking for Barry Sheppard, and he was. They thought I was CIA or something, what with my suit and short hair.

"What I found was a very pleasant surprise. These young people had organised a youth group called Resistance. Resistance was in the thick of the antiwar movement Australia.

"One of the first things these young comrades did was provide me with some warm clothes.

"I was invited to a conference held in their headquarters and bookshop, which were quite impressive. It wasn't just for members, but included a lot of young people and their group, and the room was packed. They gave reports on their political work. I gave a report that covered the antiwar and Black power movements in the United States, the Socialist Workers Party, the Fourth International, and the World Congress.

"The main leaders of Resistance were brothers, John and Jim Percy. It was Jim Percy, with his red beard, that I had approached at the airport. The Percy brothers were in a group called the International Marxist League, along with Gould. The Percy brothers were attracted to the SWP's party-building perspective, and had been in a struggle with Gould over the direction of the group. In a private meeting, they asked me to intercede, backing them against Gould. I told them that as I had just gotten to know them and Gould, I thought it would be wrong for me to do that. I explained that experience had made the SWP very wary of jumping into internal disputes among groups in other countries. They were disappointed, but knew I agreed with them on necessity of building a party in Australia.

"The result was the beginning of a close relationship between the American SWP and the party they went on to build. They had to break with Gould to do it.

"In Brussels, the Bureau was also in contact with a person in Wellington, New Zealand, by the name of Hector MacNeill. I had thought that Australia and New Zealand were pretty close, but found they are 1500 miles apart when I flew to Wellington. I stayed with Hector and his wife in their small home. I remember that they had a whole lot of butter on their table, and we ate a lot of lamb, both of which were cheap in Zealand.

"As in Australia, I found that Hector had a group of youth around him interested in socialism. This wasn't as big a group as in Australia, but they were campus leaders involved in the antiwar movement. I encouraged them to go in the direction of building an organisation. The main young leaders I met were the Fyson brothers, George and Hugh. They did go on to build an organisation, and had to break with MacNeill to do it. As was the case with the Australians, the New Zealand group developed close ties with the American SWP in the years following my trip. They would jokingly refer to me as the `father' of their group.

"I flew back to Sydney for more discussions, and then headed back to the United States. At the immigration station, they were routinely checking the names of all passengers in a fat book. When they got to me, they evidently found me listed. I was hauled into a small room, all my belongings and papers were searched, and the papers were copied.

"I stayed in New York for the SWP convention, held in early September. I gave a report on the international political situation and the discussion that had begun in the Fourth International. After the convention, Caroline and I flew back to Brussels."


It would be difficult to exaggerate how much the Zinovievist process, of which Sheppard himself had become part, became a powerful factor in the later transformation of all three groups, in the US, Australia and New Zealand, into the rather rigid sects that they now are.

It's a mistake when reading history and memoir to impose on the past too much of what one now knows, or thinks one knows. That's a mistake that's obvious in current writing about the labour movement by DSP "historians" such as John Percy and Jim McIlroy.

Nevertheless, it strikes me that the difference in approach between myself and Sheppard are partly problems of the labour movements in our respective countries, which has culminated in the extravagant ultraleftism now advocated by Barry Sheppard, Caroline Lund and Malik Miah concerning the trade union movement.

I came in to the revolutionary socialist movement in the midst of a big fight between the left and right in the trade unions and the Labor Party for the future and soul of those movements, and I came into it from a family with deep roots in the Australian labour movement.

Those early experiences partly defined my approach to politics and they still do, to some extent. The experiences of Sheppard and the Percy brothers were quite different, and that shaped their approach.

That's all, however, another story. The rather exotic situation of Sheppard and his two associates in the US being forced to have his book published by the Australian DSP underlines the vicissitudes that can befall one in the socialist movement.

Taken as a whole, Sheppard's book adds quite a lot to our knowledge, and anyone interested in the history of the revolutionary socialist movement would do well to read it carefully, with the caveats, obviously, that I've just outlined.

I will take up my sharp disagreement with the political propositions on the trade unions and the labour movement, advanced by Sheppard, Lund and Miah, in another article. In the interim, anyone interested should read the article by Miah and Lund on these matters in the latest issue of Links.

The Socialist Workers Party in the Sixties and Beyond

The Socialist Workers Party in the Sixties and Beyond

by Paul Le Blanc

The Party: The Socialist Workers Party, 1960–1988, a Political Memoir, Volume 1: The Sixties, by Barry Sheppard. Melbourne, Australia: Resistance Books, 2005, 354 pages including indexes; distributed in the United States by Haymarket Books, P.O. Box 180165, Chicago, IL 60618 (order from: www.haymarketbooks.org). Paperback, $16.00.

Today’s realities continue to reflect class, racial, and gender oppression, cultural and environmental degradation, antidemocratic and imperialist violence. Such things continue to spawn shock, disillusionment, anger, protest, resistance. There has been a resurgence of radicalization among layers of the population in the United States, especially among many who have come to political awareness since American capitalism’s much-heralded triumph over “Communism.” Barry Sheppard’s book is a sustained exercise in retrieving memories of experiences associated with left-wing radicalism prevalent in the 1960s. This is done especially for the benefit of younger activists who have become engaged in the struggle for global justice in opposition to the corporate-military quest for “empire.”

Actually, Sheppard’s memoir begins in the mid-1950s and concludes in 1973, the first of two volumes corresponding to his own involvement, which ended in 1988, in the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP), associated with the revolutionary perspectives of Leon Trotsky. These perspectives included Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which saw worker-led democratic revolution spilling over into socialist revolution; an unyielding revolutionary internationalism; and a rejection of the bureaucratic dictatorship represented by the Stalin regime in the USSR.

What the SWP Did

Sheppard’s contribution is unique in its focus on the remarkable rise of the SWP in the 1960s and early 1970s. Born out of fierce factional conflicts in the Stalinized Communist Party of the 1920s and in the reformist Socialist Party of the 1930s, and after hopeful glory days of the 1930s and ’40s, the SWP had become a shell of itself by the 1950s, thanks to an unprecedented capitalist prosperity and a stifling climate of Cold War anti-Communism in the wake of World War II. From 1960 to 1973, however, the SWP and its youth group the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) grew from about 400 to about 3,000 cadres. They became a significant force in a number of initiatives:

Fair Play for Cuba Committees, organized to oppose aggressive policies by the U.S. government against Cuba after Fidel Castro and Che Guevara led the Cuban Revolution to triumph in 1959;
Student Peace Union, which protested against the testing of atomic and hydrogen bombs and the threat to humanity posed by the possibility of nuclear war in the early 1960s;
Civil rights and black liberation movements, in activities ranging from eyewitness reporting on early challenges to Jim Crow in the South for the SWP’s newsweekly, The Militant, to honoring black trade unionist E.D. Nixon (who played a pivotal role in the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott), to helping organize nationwide picketing of Woolworth’s stores in support of the 1960 Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins, to rallying in defense of Robert F. Williams (militant president of the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP, who advocated armed self-defense by Blacks against the Ku Klux Klan); the SWP also played a special role in helping Malcolm X convey his revolutionary nationalist perspectives more widely than would otherwise have been possible;
Early stirrings of feminism’s “second wave”—from animated early discussion of Frederick Engels’s views on gender equality in pre-class societies and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, to involvement with the National Organization for Women and the abortion rights struggle, not to mention the increasingly prominent involvement of women in the SWP and YSA at all levels;
Socialist electoral challenges to capitalist politics-as-usual, sometimes joining with others on the Left to run left-wing candidates, sometimes running aggressive and colorful campaigns in the name of the SWP, and always using the campaigns, often quite effectively, to promote current social struggles and to win people to socialist ideas;
The movement to end the war in Vietnam.
In this last initiative, one can find a number of key elements of the SWP’s success. The period of the Vietnam war was the first time in U.S. history when a majority of the population shifted from accepting the government’s war to opposing it. Mass demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands and reflecting the thinking of millions were organized year after year, by such broad coalitions as the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and the National Peace Action Coalition, posing a sharp challenge and a growing barrier to the power of prowar politicians and policymakers. Some in the antiwar movement (including the present author) had an illusion that the antiwar effort could be shifted into a multi-issue course in order to transform it into a mass radical movement. We believed this would be able to usher in a more fundamental social and political change than “merely” U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam; for some this was seen as taking place through the Democratic Party, for others it was seen as taking place well to the left of and against both the Democratic and Republican parties.

In contrast, the SWP called for a movement with a single focus—immediate, unconditional U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam (translated into the popular slogan “bring the troops home now”). That was too radical for most Democratic Party liberals, who preferred more equivocal slogans. SWPers nonetheless labored tirelessly to build a nonexclusionary united front to organize peaceful, legal mass demonstrations around the “out now” position. While the single-issue focus was linked to other various issues (Black liberation, women’s liberation, labor struggles, opposition to poverty, civil liberties, etc.), in speeches, flyers, and specific contingents in the mass demonstrations, the demonstrations were open to all who agreed on the antiwar perspective, regardless of where they stood on other issues, and regardless of what political party they did or did not support. This was the strategy that, in fact, made the antiwar movement an increasingly effective force that helped limit the options of the warmakers, by mobilizing colossal demonstrations year after year. As the group that was most consistent in advancing this orientation, and as a quite effective and highly-disciplined party, the SWP became central and unrivaled leaders of the antiwar movement and helped bring an end to that bloody conflict.

Some Personal Recollections

This brought a significant layer of new left and antiwar activists (including the present author) into the SWP by 1973, which is basically when this first volume of Sheppard’s memoir ends.

The SWP and YSA were organizationally and politically far more serious than anything I had participated in previously. I received an incomparable and multifaceted education within them. One facet of this was simply practical, resulting from a variety of internal assignments (branch secretary, forum series director, literature sales director, bookstore director, financial director, branch organizer, as well as executive committee member) that taught me the nuts and bolts of maintaining a very active political organization in which a diverse number of individuals had to work together to accomplish a great deal.

As an electoral candidate and as a participant in a number of election campaign committees, I gained valuable experience in explaining socialist ideas to many different kinds of people. And I participated in party fractions that were active in “mass work”: opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam; protesting the U.S.-sponsored coup in Chile and working to defend Latin American political prisoners; building support for struggles of the farm workers, teachers, mine workers, and other unions; undertaking civil liberties efforts and opposing the death penalty; participating in student protests against tuition hikes; struggling for abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment for women; campaigning against South African apartheid and against racism here at home; and protesting against the dangers of nuclear power.

While it was not possible for me personally, at any given moment, to be involved in everything that needed to be done to bring about a better world, by being part of an organization in which all phases of activity were democratically and collectively evaluated and decided upon, I could be involved in far more activity—all of which was interrelated and part of a unified revolutionary, socialist, practical orientation—than would otherwise have been possible.

A sense of revolutionary continuity that came, in part, from having several generations of activists in a single organization. There were time-tested perspectives and norms, a rich pool of knowledge and political experience. Some of the older comrades seemed simply to be glad that they could still be part of a revolutionary movement that was being regenerated by an influx of young activists, whom they embraced with a perhaps too uncritical affection. Others seemed concerned that older revolutionary virtues of their own youth would be lost unless they (sometimes rigidly and imperiously) provided firm guidance, undergirded with long lectures and occasionally punctuated with fierce reprimands. But many of the veteran cadres maintained a balance, relating to the newer forces on a basis of genuine equality—patiently sharing their own knowledge, seeking to learn from new experience, encouraging the full development of the young comrades while frankly putting forward their own thinking on perspectives and directions for the SWP. On the whole, all these older comrades had considerable prestige among the younger layers.

Many different qualities could be found among the younger members. There was a tremendous eagerness and vibrancy—sometimes a maddening “eager-beaver” enthusiasm and a youthful “we’re the greatest” arrogance about the SWP and YSA, which alienated unsympathetic outsiders. Some took to copying the mannerisms of the prestigious elders—talking sagely about “the way we do things” even if they had been members for only twelve months, speaking about experiences of bygone years (before they had been born) as if they had been participants, hewing sometimes rigidly (unlike many of the older comrades) to imperfectly assimilated orthodoxies. These jostled with the more rebellious spirits who saw no need to cease being outspoken mavericks simply because their rebelliousness had brought them into a revolutionary organization. This by itself guaranteed the flare-up of passionate, animated arguments—sometimes fed by one or another neurosis, and sometimes cohering around genuine political differences. There were also many who were more pragmatically inclined (sometimes interested in discussing ideas, sometimes not) who concentrated their energies more exclusively on working effectively in the mass movements and maintaining party institutions. Theories, party history, and critical ideas were judged in more practical terms of how they seemed to advance the party’s work in the here and now. The energies of all these young activists contributed to the movement’s dynamism in the 1970s.

Much energy was certainly needed for the seemingly endless succession of weekly branch meetings, educationals, fraction and committee meetings, sales of the party’s newspaper The Militant, forums, activities of the mass movements, and so on that formed a way of life for many of us, This made the SWP an especially demanding environment for normal working people, students serious about their formal education, and those with families. This very distinctive subculture helped to make us effective in the many activities, movements, and struggles that we engaged in. It also created a separate universe that often made it difficult for us to understand and relate to those outside of it. This could have a negative impact on members’ sense of perspective. Sometimes this made it possible for collectively-embraced notions to distort our understanding of complex realities, undermining our effectiveness in communicating to people. It also blunted our ability, sometimes, to anticipate possibilities and limitations in the dynamic political and social contexts of the larger society.

Failings and Decline

In the early 1970s, a transition was initiated, resulting in the older central leadership layer, shaped by the 1930s and ’40s labor struggles, being replaced by a much younger layer of 1960s activists, led by Carleton College graduate Jack Barnes and his second-in-command Barry Sheppard from Boston University and MIT.

Although the writings of Lenin, Trotsky, and U.S. Trotskyist founder James P. Cannon were avidly read, discussed, and internalized by the young activists, the context in which the revolutionary “teachers” from earlier decades had lived and the context in which the avid students of the 1960s lived were qualitatively different. The relationship of the new radicals to the rest of the working class, not to mention the culture and consciousness of both the actual proletariat and its would-be “vanguard” in the 1970s were far different from what was true in the early 1900s or the 1930s. A failure to comprehend the meaning of this ruptured continuity would contribute to the rise of a fatal disorientation that accelerated within the SWP as the 1970s flowed into the 1980s, culminating in fragmentation and implosion. For some disillusioned SWPers, responsibility for these outcomes was laid at the door of Lenin and/or Trotsky and/or Cannon. Some bitterly came to dismiss everything having to do with the SWP.

This failure, however, more or less afflicted all Marxist-oriented organizations in the U.S. from the late 1970s through the late 1980s. Ironically, this occurred as influences from the 1960s radicalization permeated much of the U.S. population, and as negative impacts from the early manifestations of “globalization” created remarkable new openings for left-wing developments within the working class. At the same time, many actual and potential activists who are technically part of the working class have been more drawn to “identities” related to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc., and to specific issues (war and militarism, human rights, ecological concerns, globalization, etc.).

The SWP that Barry Shepard describes might have weathered the crisis of the late 1970s and ’80s—it would seem to have contained qualities facilitating fruitful adaptation. It stands to reason, therefore, that there were certain other qualities in the SWP, muted or missing in volume 1 of Sheppard’s memoir, that generated a far less positive outcome. This included a hothouse and disruptively carried-out “industrialization” policy in the late 1970s, which sent almost all cadres into factories regardless of personal, political, or economic realities—an especially serious problem given the relative decline of U.S. industry in the 1980s. It included a romantic fantasy that Fidel Castro’s Cuban Communist Party was about to forge a new revolutionary international—“necessitating” a rapid, top-down abandonment of Trotskyist theory. It included a grotesque tightening of “party discipline” that drove hundreds of actual, incipient, and potential dissidents out of the SWP (including a majority of its remaining veterans from the 1930s and ’40s)—a campaign which Sheppard helped to implement in its early stages, and of which he was a victim in its later stages.

The SWP seems so incredibly good in this book—how could it have turned out so badly? There is hardly a glimmer of such negative possibilities in what Sheppard writes. But there is more than one reason why this limitation can be forgiven. First of all, Sheppard himself explicitly acknowledges these silences, and he promises to take up such matters in the upcoming volume that deals with the SWP’s decline. Second, this relatively uncritical account provides a sense of the mindset, at the time, of Sheppard and many other SWP comrades. And it also allows for a straightforward telling of a story that needs to be told.

Even in this first volume, Sheppard begins to introduce a critical note. While the SWP and YSA played a role in early civil rights efforts of the late 1950s and ’60s, he suggests that it would have been wise for them to become involved in the 1964 Freedom Summer efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He is critical of the SWP’s earlier homophobic tendencies (shared with most of the Left up to the 1970s) and self-critically suggests that its pathbreaking reversal of this failed to go far enough. While Sheppard never questions the centrality of the working class as the force that must bring the socialist future into being, he suggests that an overly optimistic notion predominated in the SWP leadership regarding how soon class-conscious workers might be expected to play such a role on the U.S. political scene. And while he clearly indicates his own preference for the leadership style and perspectives of Farrell Dobbs over the older and more seasoned Jim Cannon, he does draw attention—in his discussion of an initial tightening of organizational norms in 1965–66—to Cannon’s prophetic warning to the Dobbs leadership (even more relevant for the Barnes leadership): “Don’t strangle the party.”

A Book Worth Reading

In this book we get a sense of how a relative handful of people—aging Trotskyist veterans and younger activists—utilized certain basic organizational norms and political principles to build a dynamic organization that made a real difference in the United States from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. At the same time, while providing insights on the personalities and internal workings of U.S. Trotskyism in this period, Sheppard conscientiously seeks to connect the activities of the SWP to the larger historical contexts: the Cold War, the Hungarian revolution, the Algerian war for independence, developments in the Middle East, the “thaw” in the USSR, the mass slaughter of leftists in Indonesia, the Vietnam conflict, the so-called Cultural Revolution in China, the May–June 1968 student-worker rebellion in France, the ill-fated Prague Spring that reached for “socialism with a human face,” and more.

Another valuable dimension of the volume is Sheppard’s discussion of the Fourth International, the global organizational network of revolutionary groups embracing a majority of the world’s organized Trotskyists, to which the SWP adhered as a “sympathizing section.” He gives interesting glimpses of some of his own rich experiences with comrades in Europe, India, and Sri Lanka. He also begins a discussion (to be concluded in volume 2) of a sharp factional dispute in the Fourth International from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s over whether the world revolutionary breakthrough would be advanced by a continental strategy of rural guerrilla warfare in Latin America. Sheppard and other SWP leaders argued in the negative, insisting on the continued relevance of the classical Leninist-Trotskyist method of party building and applying the Transitional Program, seeking to raise demands to reach and mobilize mass movements.

This orthodoxy posited that all political organizing must facilitate two things: (1) the education and mobilization of masses of people, especially the working-class majority, to struggle for democratic and “immediate” social and economic advances, and (2) the building and strengthening of a revolutionary party capable of helping to lead masses of workers and their allies not only in struggles for democratic and immediate demands, but also for transitional demands leading towards socialism. Such an orientation also put the SWP at loggerheads with many other currents on the U.S. Left in the heady days of which Sheppard writes.

There are some errors that have crept into this text which should be corrected in future printings. Reference is made to the almost suicidally ultraleft Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) arising a year before it actually came into being. Another incorrect reference is made to the Pentagon Papers as the source demonstrating that Presidents Johnson and Nixon, in contrast to their public statements of indifference, were quite concerned and upset by mass antiwar protests. This fact is revealed in numerous comments by their former aides and, for Nixon, also in the Watergate Transcripts—but not in the Pentagon Papers which (as Sheppard notes elsewhere in this volume) “documented the involvement of the United States from 1945 to mid-1968” in Vietnam, and “told the truth, in contrast to the lies the government spoonfed the public about the reasons for the war.”

There are, of course, also interpretations of events that are open to question. Having been in the New Left milieu about which the author writes from the outside, I think there are oversimplifications mixed with the insights—which may also be the case regarding the influence of the Communist Party, with which the SWP had been crossing swords for over three decades. Yet even if one might question certain judgments, they give a fairly accurate gauge of the kinds of judgments many SWPers made at the time. The text is also generously sprinkled with gems of bluntly-expressed wisdom, such as “Whenever capitalist politicians talk about ‘the national interest,’ take heed. They invariably mean the interests of the ruling rich.”

Some of the SWP’s history and personalities are conveyed, as well, with a generous sampling of photographs, and the volume is enhanced with three helpful indexes: one of names, one of organizations, and one of events, ideas and topics. While not pretending to be the final word on the history of American Trotskyism, Sheppard’s book tells a story worth telling. It is a valuable source for activists (and for scholars), and one looks forward to the continuation of the story in the next volume. Its publication will help to advance thinking and discussions that will inevitably be stirred by this first volume regarding the extent to which positive aspects of the SWP’s legacy might be utilized (and negative aspects avoided) in ways that will help activists transform the 21st century.

[A somewhat different version of this review will appear in Against the Current.]

The Party...continues

As I said earlier, I will be putting up postings about "The Party" and my analysis of its contents when i have them written.
In the meantime I am going to post several other reviews of the book here, starting with one in the current edition of Socialist Action.
See
http://www.socialistaction.org/auciellomackler1.htm

See below:

The Life of the Party: Barry Sheppard, the SWP & the 1960s
by Joe Auciello & Jeff Mackler / August 2006 issue of Socialist Action



Barry Sheppard, “The Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988, A Political Memoir,” Volume 1: The Sixties, (Resistance Books: Chippendale, Australia, 2005), 354 pp., $16.


At a certain point in a person's life there comes a need for reflection and assessment. Socialist veteran Barry Sheppard developed that impulse into an insightful and instructive book that should be required reading for any young revolutionist who wants to learn from the successes and failures of the "Sixties Generation."
But this volume will not only appeal to the young. An older generation, participants of that era, will find in this book a stirring reminiscence of the social rebellion and the political battles that formed the very center of their lives.
Sheppard was a leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) for three decades, from the 1960s to the early 1990s. The story of the SWP's demise and Sheppard's role in it is promised in the author's sequel, or Volume II. The present volume steers clear of this tragic period.

During the time covered by this book, 1960-1973, Sheppard, as part of the SWP's leadership team, contributed to the party as the editor of its newspaper, The Militant, as the SWP's fraternal representative in Europe to the Fourth International (the world party founded by Leon Trotsky), and as its national organizational secretary.

In the 1980s, Sheppard had been a central player in the undemocratic expulsion and driving out from the SWP of close to 200 members. The majority of the expelled members, who had fought to retain the SWP’s Trotskyist tradition, formed Socialist Action at the end of 1983 and the Fourth Internationalist Tendency in 1984.



Sheppard himself was expelled from the SWP seven years later. Soon afterwards, and with profuse apologies for his past conduct, he joined Socialist Action—only to lead a bitter faction fight and split a year later. He immediately joined the Committees of Correspondence (a group that had broken from the Communist Party), and later joined a diffuse "socialist regroupment" formation called Solidarity.



By this time, the Barry Sheppard that is described in this personal memoir and mini-history had gone on to reject major portions of the revolutionary program of Trotskyism, which for 50 years had placed the SWP in the vanguard of revolutionary organizations. This was the SWP that first attracted Sheppard, along with an impressive layer of revolutionary-minded youth, to a party with a proud tradition going back to the Russian Revolution of 1917.



Sheppard's book is distributed in the U.S. by supporters of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), whose members have organized a number of his speaking engagements to promote it.



As well as being close to the ISO, Sheppard has over the past several years been a supporter of the reformist Green Party and the electoral campaigns of former SWPer, now California Green Party candidate for governor, Peter Camejo. The Barry Sheppard whose political life and contributions are related in "The Party" would have then denied that the road to the construction of the future mass revolutionary party (which Sheppard still hails) would pass through the Greens or any other brand of middle-class radicalism.

"Important lessons" for the future

"The Party" successfully blends several genres, so that the sum is greater than its individual parts. Sheppard combines political history, personal memoir, and occasionally adds contemporary commentary—with the advantage of hindsight. His effort includes several succinct and highly valuable explanations of complex ideas that were hotly debated in the radical movement of his time.



Newcomers to revolutionary politics will appreciate his sharp expositions on the revolutionary nature of the Black nationalism of Malcolm X, the class nature of the former Soviet Union, and the importance of the Cuban Revolution.



Sheppard effectively relates how the SWP played a critical role in engaging the party ranks with the principled politics that made the SWP a major force in the united-front coalitions that mobilized millions against the war and, along with the courageous struggles of the Vietnamese people, forced the U.S. to withdraw. The SWP is perhaps best known for this effort, still a model for the construction of a politically independent struggle against imperialist war.



In his preface, Sheppard rightly stresses what is valuable in his book: "[T]here are important lessons for the present and future in the experience of the SWP·" These lessons would include how the SWP contributed to the protest movements of its time, especially the 10-year fight against the Vietnam War, and how the SWP functioned internally as a democratic and centralist organization.



Certain chapters in this work help put to rest old suspicions that have resurfaced as new polemics (see the review of Manning Marable's "A Living Black History" in the March 2006 issue of Socialist Action). Various writers from across the political spectrum have viewed the SWP's relationship with Malcolm X as exploitative and self-serving. These charges have been motivated more by misunderstanding and political bias than by an open-minded assessment of the factual evidence.



In a chapter on Malcolm X, Sheppard concisely outlines the turning points of Malcolm's life and explains "the revolutionary response of the Socialist Workers Party to the rise of Black nationalism and the revolutionary development of Malcolm X." "The Militant newspaper," he points out, "when it did not print Malcolm's talks and statements outright, "reported the content of his speeches honestly, in contrast to the daily press and most publications on the left."



Malcolm spoke at three SWP forums and gave interviews to The Militant and The Young Socialist, newspaper of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). Shortly before his assassination, Malcolm agreed to a nationwide speaking tour sponsored by the YSA. Naturally, the YSA would attempt to gain the widest sponsorship possible for each speaking engagement, but, Sheppard states with justified pride, "Malcolm replied that even if only the YSA sponsored the speaking tour, it would be OK with him."



In short, relations between the SWP/YSA and Malcolm X were characterized by mutual respect, deepening understanding, and cooperation, based on shared values and overlapping political goals.



Sheppard adds a personal note to the record of the SWP and Malcolm X. Writing with unabashed admiration, he concludes the chapter with a heartfelt and powerful statement: "Malcolm X was the greatest person I have ever met."



Sheppard's book, again, is a "personal memoir," and therefore its range is not encyclopedic. The perspective of personal history is both its strength and weakness. Readers will encounter contemporary events and gain the insight of a participant but will, at the same time, be limited to what that one person actually saw and heard and what that person chose to report.



Party of professional revolutionaries


In the spring of 1969, as a member of an SWP delegation, Sheppard traveled to Italy to attend the Ninth World Congress of the Fourth International and in the summer toured through Asia to meet with like-minded Trotskyist comrades. Though this trip makes interesting reading for SWP members and FI supporters, it was hardly the typical experience of a Sixties radical, who was far from the professional revolutionary that Sheppard chose as his vocation.



The SWP was a party of professional revolutionaries and disciplined and dedicated comrades. Sheppard relates this well. His book explains the rise of the Socialist Workers Party into a significant force on the American left after long years of relative isolation during the McCarthy-era witch hunt.



The previous generation of SWPers, whose central leadership core had been imprisoned for 18 months as the first victims of the reactionary 1940 Smith Act, hailed from the great labor struggles of the 1930s. In 1934, the SWP (then called the Communist League of America) helped set the standard for class-struggle unionism by leading the historic Minneapolis Teamster strike, one of the three general strikes that paved the way for the formation of the CIO.



Sheppard's book is laced with references to SWP founder James P. Cannon and to other central leaders of the SWP from the earlier generation. At times he goes into great detail to explain little known conflicts between Cannon and Farrell Dobbs, co-leader with Cannon of the SWP and the party's first presidential candidate in 1948. Woven into these accounts is Sheppard's negative assessment of the grouping in the party led by Murray Weiss.



Sheppard is often critical of Cannon's close relations with the Weiss group. He states without equivocation that Cannon erred on several occasions by essentially promoting his trusted Weiss supporters at the expense of undermining the authority of the Dobbs leadership. He refers to still unpublished material written by Dobbs in this matter that would undoubtedly be of great interest to students of revolutionary politics and party-building.



The transition in leadership


Of even greater interest, however, are those internal party disputes that begin to provide an explanation for the demise of the SWP.



The transition from the leadership team of 1930s class-struggle fighters such as Cannon, Dobbs, and Tom Kerry to the youthful leadership of Sheppard and Jack Barnes, the present SWP national secretary, was not without conflict. Sheppard provides many of the details. But left out is an assessment of the effect on the SWP of a relatively rapid leadership transition necessitated by the inevitable aging of one generation and its replacement by another.



The old leadership had been tested in the mass struggles that built the CIO. They fought for revolutionary socialism against a mass Stalinized Communist Party and a ruling class that feared revolution was on its doorstep. It was replaced largely by a middle-class layer of college students—with some experience in the antiwar movement and other contemporary movements perhaps, but with no organic connection to the class-struggle battles that had forged the SWP's program and practice.



The tiny layer of older SWPers who had been recruited in the relatively barren McCarthy era, during which time the SWP was reduced to a few hundred, was largely bypassed. This generation gap—the lack of experienced revolutionary leadership due to the long period of relative working-class quiescence—offers the beginnings of an explanation of why and how the SWP was fundamentally transformed into a grotesque caricature of its former self.



Today, the SWP stands in opposition to or essentially abstains from the very political movements that in the past it would have championed. Its erroneous political line and horrendous internal practices have reduced it to an irrelevant sect or cult.



Sheppard's first volume is silent on this evolution, and painfully restricted to the highpoints of his experience. At a number of public presentations of his work, however, he has frankly admitted that he played an important role in facilitating the SWP's demise.



Volume I is perhaps in the way of an apology of sorts; it contains short, sprinkled, and favorable references to a number of Sheppard's former comrades who opposed his course inside the SWP and who he had previously held in contempt, if not expelled. Their names and a line or two about their contributions, mention of which is virtually banned in the SWP today, have been restored for the record, albeit far too late and with little import other than to assuage a conscience that had previously been but dimly present.



Sheppard now has largely retired from party-building work but hopefully not from his stated pledge to shed light on the disintegration of a party that thousands of youthful comrades and lifelong revolutionaries devoted their lives to. Others, however—more closely connected to the present struggle for socialist revolution—are eminently more qualified to take on this task. In time, they will step forward to unravel the tragedy of the SWP's degeneration and thereby provide solid ground to avoid its repetition.



"The Party" can be obtained in the United States through Haymarket Books. Or send $21 to Socialist Action Books. (Our price includes shipping and handling. California residents, please add $1.35 sales tax.)

The Party

I have just finished reading an excellent account of the history of the American Socialist Workers party. This is entitled The Sixties: Volume 1-A political memoir and is by long time former leader of that party Barry Sheppard.
Barry is no longer in the SWP and I will write a lengthy review later.

Mikey