Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

Events leading to an Unprincipled Split of the HWRS

Introduction 

The rump of what was the HWRS then, a rump composed of an inside-outside faction with neither program nor principles, has expelled the serving Executive Committee elected at the 2009 Conference and departed down the short steep slope to becoming a finished sect. Nothing remains the same, we are taught by dialectics, and things turn into their opposites. In the HWRS case the transformative process is already nearly complete. A reverse path up and away from ignorant political negation is possible, but only with rigorous self-examination and a fearless re-commitment to Bolshevik-Leninism, and in the first place to telling the truth.

Leading this inside-outside faction is the ex-member ** who considers himself “one of the five people in the world who understands the dialectic,” something he has told the members many, many times, without once letting on who he thinks the other four might be, where we should look for them, or what tactic we should employ to attract and recruit them. Modest he isn’t. Read his letter to the LC of 6/25 and you will see even greater grandiosity.

Do you have many leisure hours to spare on Skype phone calls? He proposes you use them all listening to his brilliance under the influence of his medications. His disease is progressively overtaking him, and until not long ago he would freely confess that it was affecting the fight-or-flight centers of his brain. Our sympathy is genuine for his disability.

Our patience with his behavior, however, is exhausted.

For our part we of the EC have to confess to permitting the many alienating egotistical expressions of this characteristic sort and for too long. These offensive words and deeds began to haunt the HWRS political life almost from the first. At the time of the 2009 FLTI Congress DW requested of C. Munzer that he send us someone from Argentina to help him recruit “the whole layer “(sic) of youth in “Advance the Struggle,” a circle of self-styled Gramscians of whom he had not yet met one member of.  When he did meet them he roundly cursed them out politically, leaving no room for any degree of minimum agreement or common work.  This tendency went on to thrive in Occupy Oakland, making many opportunist mistakes, while taking not a whit of advice from what they call “***’s group.”

This is just one example of what must look like charlatanism to those groping their own way in the class struggle and wishing they could find a Marxist Humanism that does not reject Leninism and does not reject the vanguard per se. HWRS was supposed to be this Marxist Humanism! At last && and %% had to criticize the behavior that was haunting all our party work in an internal pre-convention discussion contribution. Our CRITICISM of **’s alienating behavior and the dynamics this loosed in our tendency is the SOLE actual reason for our “expulsion” by his lash up faction, his “majority” of HWRS.

The inside-outside faction can not face up to our criticism and discuss it. To do so would reveal the several different **-approval dependency relations involved and their consequences. These are, so far, overriding the political differences within the faction and keeping them hidden from the LC. Members depended on DW to digest the class struggle news and give them the authoritative analysis and were not troubled by his non-participation, first on his leaves of absence, then as an ex-member beginning on 2/8/12. When && or %% led off the weekly meeting agendas with an International Report we found no one else had read source materials. We (the EC) passed a motion for && to subscribe to “Stratfor” so that comrades could keep track of important international news in one place (the membership rejected the expense && purchased it himself.) When ** would intervene as a guest he would reveal his own ignorance, which was the product of his serial vacations!  He then opined that the real Workers Voice (WV) tradition was to begin meetings with a prepared educational (INSTEAD!) And amazingly, we went along with his long-winded, highly medicated motivation!

The problem, of course, was we were 20 years younger and many times more activist in the days of the WV tradition and at least several times better prepared on international analyses as a group. $$, a signer of the charges against the EC, prepared the Educational on Greece that preceded the 5/18 meeting, and this was the source of most of the misinformation and incorrect analysis in the later “alternative” public position to our article for “Revolutionary Worker,” although we did not know it then. We only discovered how ill- and mis-informed we had been as we spent the Memorial Day weekend researching, writing and meeting the “R.W.” deadline. $$ canceled the regular 5/25 meeting at “the Winter Palace” and before we could call another meeting we had given DW his pretext for charging us with deserting the politics of HWRS by recommending to the Zimbabwean workers our highly critical support to SYRIZA in an election that would settle nothing, as we said. $$, not incidentally, has recently denied being a revolutionary, saying the required commitment is too great.

In his e-mail of 6/8/12 DW tips his hand, revealing his real thinking. The “alternative statement” on the Greek elections only was to come about as an answer and refutation, and as part of a “reprimand” for our authoring the “Revolutionary Worker” article! ** said that to write an article with advice for revolutionaries in a country where we haven’t even a nucleus  of a party “…smells of opportunism.” This attitude explains why he did not volunteer to write the “RW” article himself, or write many other things in his uninterrupted leisure, where he hides behind his unfortunate illness. In fact his political development nowadays can be described as recoiling in the direction of the method of his sectarian outfit roots, while at the same time making excuses for the wild gyrations of his supporters, left and right. And this degeneration is accelerating.

One long time sympathizer, @@, took to taking his own leaves of absence by declaration, dodging public party work and choosing which assignments he can disregard for his own personal or political purposes.  @@ blew off his assignment to write to the FSP in response to their request for endorsement of their presidential campaign. The HWRS had asked sympathizer @@ to write the FSP and ask if their candidates would publicly take up the cases of two whistle blowers an act on their part which would go a long way toward deciding the HWRS on whether to give FSP critical support or not.  It occurs to us now that @@ was not being lazy this time.  Rather he was ignoring decisions of the HWRS membership meeting and instead was taking cues from the leader of the inside/outside faction, **, who secretly opposes the critical support tactic universally.   In the build up to the SEIU L.U. 1021 strike authorization vote,  @@ produced an opportunist leaflet in secret for distribution to his co-workers on the day of the vote. Our criticism of this behavior and this economist leaflet, are for **, ‘taking advantage of @@’s insecurities!’ Yet this same @@ supports the wildly ultraleft position the rump-HWRS has put forward in the last week in the July 16th Muni Strike Coalition, with a leaflet going out to the public beginning today that calls for Workers Defense Guards of the oppressed communities to “run the police out of town!”

That this is a demand for an insurrection on July 16^th when no strike or even a real mobilization is likely has escaped them. They, and @@, an RTT founding member(!) are too busy denouncing our reformist “laundry list” demands. This in a coalition, where one wing is about to meet and plead with the California Attorney General!

We could remind them that the Transitional Program itself contains many reformist, partial and democratic, as well as transitional demands. But ** suddenly also has a new conception of how to employ, and especially where to employ (we can’t wait to see this!!) the transitional program. All this to cover the intervention of his two ostensible co-thinkers of a week ago when they sought to eliminate “Cops Out of Schools!,” “Cops Out of Transit!,” and “End Stop-And-Frisk Nationwide!” from the coalition leaflets.  DW declares that these are impermissible because they are demands placed upon the bourgeois state, “thus” fostering illusions that these demands can be met by the bourgeois state (!) This even though, as we said in the NY LB&B leaflet for the Fathers’ Day March Against Racial Profiling (June 17th–it drew 100,000!), and as we always say “…But to drive the police out we will need Union-Community unity for Parent-Pupil-Teacher control of the schools. And we may need the muscle of the Labor-Community Defense Guards as well.”

But it is apparent that it makes no difference what we say. Everything is staked upon not discussing the document where we “slander” him.  To keep this faction afloat with all his supporters giving the impression of bobbing along in the same direction, with members carrying on in the lazy routine manner, we must be made into enemies of the working class and subjected to encyclopedic torrents of vilifications. He reminds us of the Turgenev prose poem “A Rule of Life” cited by Lenin in “Materialism and Empiriocriticism,” where the charlatan’s advice is to denounce most of all the vices you yourself possess. At the moment ** is carrying this off and three faction members in attendance at one political event is truly an exception to the recent abstentionist performance norm. This is now their only arena with the deletion of the trade union work  of the EC comrades they have judged a “waste of time.”  They are dynamiting the foundations of what could have been the iconic revolutionary Marxist development of this century on this continent.

How DW provoked and carried out the spilt from outside the organization

The struggle for a proletarian party is and always has been based on political clarification leading to splits, fusions and regroupments. The difficult task of the revolutionary worker is to assure these organizational transformations are principled and can be understood by the vanguard workers who demand that a leadership emerge which bases itself, both in theory and practice, and maintains or fights to maintain a principled existence.  Unfortunately a non-member of HWRS was able to split the organization before a full discussion of HWRS’s internal problems could be held.  The consequence of which is that a discussion which, if held inside the organization, may have led to a principled reconciliation, will now be held in public, as  what are now two opponent organizations explain their separate existence before the international vanguard.

The split was precipitated before the organization was able to investigate properly the depth and breadth of the long-simmering differences in the organization.  Vanguard workers will demand of any revolutionary nucleus emerging from splits in the workers movement that they provide an accounting for both the mode of the split and the principles upon which the split was based.  The EC of the former HWRS will provide such an accounting herein:

1)    The sectarian abstentionists in the group formed a bloc with HWRS supporters who were not full members.  The leader of the bloc (a supporter who resigned on Feb 8^th for health reasons) claimed the EC had perpetrated slander upon him by articulating an ongoing dynamic of alienation within the organization, which the EC contends is responsible for impeding the development of the organization in every area.   The comrade who had resigned (**) considered the articulation of the dynamic of a detrimental alienation as expressed by the EC in the internal discussion to be slander against him.

2)    The EC thus stood charged as slanderers by a former-member (founder, emeritus theoretician, supporter.)   The EC demanded the retraction of the slander charge as the necessary precondition to discussion of political differences with a non-member and for continuing the pre-conference discussion opened in mid-May with those who accuse the EC of being slanderers.  The former member (**) demanded a Control Commission (CC) to clear his name.  This was a stunt as it was preceded by pressure by the former member to delay the HWRS congress for a quarter of a year so he could prepare a counter document to those presented by the EC.  The EC noted that due to the limited size of the organization there were not enough members with acceptable claim to objectivity to sit on a CC.

3)    In the meantime the former member created an inside/outside faction via the mechanism of signing a letter with one other sympathizer and the other half of the organization calling for a reprimand of the EC for having allegedly changing the program and method of the organization as regards the Greek elections. Their letter called for a new position to be written at the next meeting and to publish it and distribute it to the international workers’ vanguard.

4)    The EC took the position that while the elected leadership of the organization (also composing half the organization) stood charged with being slanderers (by a former member who was demanding the rights of a full members) no political discussion with ** could go forward.  A non member who considered our EC to be composed of slanders was dictating how our organization should operate by demanding that the EC convene a CC and conduct a political discussion on the Greek elections.

5)    The EC responded by stating that there could be no political discussion until the charges were removed.  The EC wrote to the full members who signed the letter calling for the EC reprimand and for a public change of position, with the non-member who refused to withdraw the charge would be held to Leninist organizational discipline and were directed not to communicate on political issues with the non members with whom they had formed a bloc.  The EC then rescheduled the regular branch meeting as a member’s-only meeting designed to address the issues of membership and the slander charge which put an impediment in front of the pre-congress and Greek election article discussion.  In the meantime, the EC took the issue to the CWG which suggested that it might act as a CC.  This proposal was to be the topic of discussion at the rescheduled HWRS meeting (held on 6/10/12.)

6)    The EC received a letter from Comrade $$ (companion of former member **) in which she claimed the EC was only an administrative body, had no authority to change venue of the meeting and refused to attend.  The other full member stated an intention to attend but then did not.  Instead the Inside/Outside faction convened its own meeting inviting, the EC to attend and to discuss their bloc’s agenda with the smear of being slanderers hanging over the EC.  The EC refused to bend to this demand.

7)     In the intervening week  former member (**)  wrote a bold vindictive letter accusing the EC and one member in particular of being bureaucratic manipulators, pop psychologists, fake Marxists, pragmatists, economists, opportunists, etc.

8)    The EC was too busy writing its reply to the public attack on the RW Greek elections article to fully respond to that letter.   Rather when the Inside/Outside faction published their counter position to the EC’s article published in the RW, the EC had its response nearly prepared.  The EC called an HWRS full-members-only meeting and announced the agenda would include a defense of and discussion of the RW article.

9)    Under pressure from the other members of their bloc, the former member wrote two bogus conciliatory letters wherein he offered to withdraw the charges of slander for the duration of the pre-congress discussion.  But he would reserve the right to bring the charges (based on the same allegations) against the EC members after the congress.  The EC refused to accept this fakery and suggested wording for a withdrawal of charges that would take all old allegations off the table, but would retain for the former member the right to bring new charges against the EC members for words yet unspoken, should he ever choose to apply and rejoin HWRS as a full member.  But we are now charged with being draconian Stalinist bureaucrats who deny him his democratic rights.  Again we remind and ask the reader what kind of democratic rights does your organization afford non-members?

10)  Again half the organization decided to boycott the change in venue for the (6/15/12) meeting. They held their own faction meeting with the non-members.  They inducted the non-members into their bloc and in turn published a joint statement claiming that they no longer recognize the EC comrades as members of the HWRS.  The split had been effected by half the organization joining cause with sympathizers, while the charge that the EC were slanderers remained in place.

Is the charge of slander so serious as to stop discussions in their tracks?

Unlike the two full members who left the organization with the two sympathizers, ** perfectly understood the implications of holding a slander charge over the heads of the EC comrades.  Without this being resolved the credibility and revolutionary honor of the charged individuals is questioned and an honest political discussion cannot proceed.  This was not a question in the minds of the comrades of the FLT in the summer of 2009 when && accused one of the leaders of the FLT of slandering the HWRS.  Hailing from various trajectories of Trotskyism (WIVL from the IC, CWG from IC & MRCI & CEMICOR, the RNI previously working with the GB then in the FLT, the LOI-CI ex-Morenoite/ex-USEC) the entire leadership of the international put the congress on hold to resolve this charge of slander as the HWRS had placed a cloud over their leadership, under which cloud they could no longer present themselves as working class leaders with the integrity required to participate in the congress.  In that case the solution was simple. Their comrade had not read our leaflet correctly and unjustly charged us with social-chauvinism; when the leaflet was properly reviewed the charges were withdrawn on both sides and a CC was not required.  Yet the principle was clear to all that an honest party-building political discussion can not commence between accused slanderers and those who accuse them of slander until the morals question is resolved.

Half of the full membership chose to downplay or ignore the morals question.  At the same time, ¾ of the members and a significant number of sympathizers either stated verbally or wrote that they may not have agreed with the assessment of **’s behavior by EC (in the pre-congress document “On Objective Necessity,”) but they saw no slander in the documents.  Obviously the Inside/Outside faction while publicly in agreement on the issue of the EC’s handling of the Greek elections article, are not fully in agreement on the question of slander, which is not a secondary or tactical matter.  They saw little significance in the slander charge, and although they pressed the accuser to withdraw the charge, when he presented a bogus retraction they did not hold him to their faction’s intention.  Thus they allowed one of the aspects of the alienation which had plagued HWRS to romp unopposed in their faction.  ** started off his new current establishing for himself the right to disregard the intention of his own faction by presenting his phony retraction.

Lies, half truths, and speculation: **’s method of despair

Parsing the lies from the half truths and speculations can become a full time job, yet unlike the leadership of the opposition, our EC is comprised of workers, we do not have the leisure to apply ourselves to the full time task of providing a parry for every thrust.  However we will address some of those crucial issues which ** raised in his attack on the EC. We will make the effort to dissect the lies from the half truths and explain to comrades what occurred and what did not occur.

In **’s June 25^th letter a number of accusations are made about our work in the class struggle and we take time to address them here.

1)    Accusation: “…misusing the “Shut Down” organizing meetings as their forum for the factional discussion they ran from inside the HWRS.”

This is rich! The document He refuses to discuss was submitted for internal discussion on May 13^th 2012. To a large extent this accusation is answered in response to accusation #2.

2)    Accusation “&& decided to circulate material that he wrote himself in the name of LB&B.”

1. Response: Actually, && brought a draft proposal for a leaflet based in large part on text presented by Inside/Outside faction comrade ## to the “Shut Down” meeting of 6/12/12.   This draft was not presented as an LB&B draft but as a compilation of old text with new demands as a product of &&’s own effort.  At that (6/19/12) meeting, ## also brought a new draft leaflet.

1. While much of the thrust of the two drafts overlapped, and whereas the HWRS (EC) draft developed the logic of a workers government, the ## draft did not.  The main difference between the two drafts discussed at the meeting was programmatic.  The # leaflets bolded points at the end were:

i.     “Shut Down MUNI on July 16^th. In Memory and honor of Kenneth  Harding Jr., and All Victims of Police Murder!”

ii.     “ Organize Working Class, Black and Brown Defense Guards against Police Brutality!”

iii.     “Build a movement For an Indefinite General Strike Against the Attacks on the Unions and the Black and Brown Communities.”

 Closing bullet points in the proposed leaflet by && read       

i.     Develop transitional demands that link immediate needs to the logic of a workers government:

1.   Cops off public transit! Cops out of schools! End stop and frisk nationwide.
2.   Form up labor Black & Brown defense guards at our union halls and in our   communities to defend our communities from racist killer cops, vigilantes, scabs, union-busters, KKK and neo-Nazi’s.
3.  Establish labor Black & Brown tribunals to arrest and try killer cops, vigilantes, scabs, union busters, KKK and neo-Nazi’s.
4.  Demand labor federations form up unions of the unemployed and precarious workers.
5.  Free Public transit for youth and unemployed.
6.  End school closures! End charter schools and university privatization! Nationalize private educational institutions run all education under student, parent, teacher, worker’s control!
7.  Free education from day care to university level. Open admissions and free tuition!
8.   Jobs for all at union rate! Share the work! 30 hours work for 40 hours pay! For a sliding scale of wages & prices –abolish poverty!  Build a general strike Movement prepare the indefinite General strike!
9. In the meeting of 6/19/12 && suggested that this system of demands linked the immediate demands of the community (as in point “i.” above to the objective tasks of the class which are needed to win them point “ii.” and “iii.” above.)  Members of the rump HWRS, ## and @@ spoke against the “laundry list” of demands presented by && because the Ad Hoc committee is not a political party and that the list was too much for the people to remember and that the leaflet was too long as the demands would make it two-sided, and they objected to including the demand  “Cops out of Schools and Cops off of public transit.”  One could presume that although neither ## nor @@ elaborated it this way, their objection to those two demands in particular are for the same reason DW later explained in his contribution to the June 26^th SHUT DOWN meeting, “These slogans do not tell the workers and the oppressed how the Cops will get out of schools and Transit.  The July 16^th Muni Shut Down should not give the impression that getting the cops out can be done by putting pressure on the state legislature or by similar reformist means.  We all know that the cops will not get out of our transit, our schools and our communities unless the cops are driven out….”

One could make that presumption, that all the rump HWRS members were in agreement  on 6/19/12  but this was not the case.  The interventions of ## and @@ at the 6/19/12 meeting deleted whole planks of the LB&B program.  The exceptional, unusual attendance of DW at the 6/26/12 Ad Hoc committee meeting was to justify his comrades activity after the fact. (See appendix 2 below.)

1. The 6/19/12 meeting concluded without a leaflet or set of demands being decided upon.  As there was a Lakeview school occupation demonstration the following Saturday, the HWRS (EC) took the draft leaflet we had proposed to the meeting and turned it into an HWRS (EC) leaflet and distributed it to the school demonstration, the S.F. Gay Pride parade and to the international and national workers’ vanguard whom we have e-mail addresses for, as well as posting it at Facebook.   The original and inadequate leaflet was still available but it presented the minimal political statement of program: “THEY TAKE US DOWN WE SHUT THEM DOWN,” under the heading “SAN FRANCISCO MUNI TRANSIT STRIKE.”  Which itself is a misnomer that has been changed to “SHUT MUNI DOWN.”

1. More important than refuting the lie that && misrepresented LB&B with a leaflet, is the descent of the rump HWRS into an ultraleft sectarian tailspin lead by **’s opportunistic adaptation to the “shoot from the hip” style of ##, old HWRS’s most recent recruit, ## who regularly proclaims himself to be a pragmatist.

1. As the 6/19/12 meeting concluded without agreement on demands or a slogan statement we wrote an e-mail to (name removed) (mother of murdered Kenneth Harding JR) on 6/24/12  to explain our method and show her the final HWRS (EC) leaflet which we were already distributing.

“Dear (name removed),

Because the last Ad-Hoc committee meeting did not come up with a leaflet.  Our organization produced this leaflet (see attached which is a reworked version of the one I offered for comment on Tuesday) in our own name and are distributing it locally, nationally and internationally.

The reason the list of demands in important is that they combine the immediate needs of the community: issues like Cops out of Schools, Cops off Transit, Free transit rides for youth and unemployed, free education for all, Jobs for all through job sharing (30 hours work for 40 hours pay)  with the type of actions we will need to win them.  The labor Black and Brown self defense guards and tribunals, the political indefinite general strike, mass workers & community assemblies must be organized to win our demand and end racist murder which is a consequence of capitalist exploitation and oppression and therefore can only be ended by a workers government.  This is why we call the demands transitional, not immediate, not minimum, not maximum.  Rather we see this case as a way to educate the working class that the only way to win justice for those murdered and terrorized by racism is to abolish the system that feeds off racism and that can only be done by a workers government.

Some people at the meeting argued that this committee is not a political party and should not have the program of a political party.  This is true, yet despite this list of demands being extensive (about 10 in all) they are not the program of a political party they are a method to help the class find its way past those traitors who tell us there can be universal justice under the rule of the 1%.  There are also those like the Occupy sisters and brothers who avoid putting any demands on either the state (Cops out of school, ect) or on ourselves (form up unions of the unemployed, labor Black & Brown self defense.)  The Occupy method depends on moral outrage to build the movement.  And while we are all outraged by the immorality of shooting young black and brown men down on our streets we have to point out that capitalism is an immoral system and can not be reformed to become moral.  That is why we reject the method that depends on morality to mobilize the masses. We argue that the masses can and must be mobilized by showing them how their immediate needs are linked to the case and how by linking those needs to exposing the inability of capitalism to provide education, jobs, justice the movement will create more than just a moral argument but will provoke the type of leap in consciousness needed that will help the masses take the next step forward (forming up our own organizations: action committees, self defense guards, tribunals, etc.)”

To our surprise (name removed) then asked &* (an activist with Decolonize Oakland) to include as much of the HWRS (EC) leaflet, including the program section as she could on a more popular leaflet (with a big half-tone of Kenny’s face on it and the times and places of actions in larger font .)  The amount of text from the HWRS (EC) leaflet that made it into this version was about two paragraphs including the demands (listed above.)  This  was titled “WE DEMAND” and this gave ** ammunition for his attack that these demands are reformist or could be confused with reformist calls for legislation to reform the police through bourgeois democratic means.  In **’s typical dishonest fashion a straw man is constructed to be cut down.

How did it come about that the “Shut It Down” Ad-hoc committee has now approved three leaflets with three different sets of demands on them?

We already reviewed the happenings at the June 19^th meeting which ended without an agreed upon leaflet, the decision made by (name removed) of the Kenneth Harding Foundation to authorize &* to create the leaflet based on the HWRS (EC) leaflet, and we saw the introduction of a new draft by ## of the rump HWRS, with the later fig leaf from ** in his letter brought to the 6/26/12 meeting.

Nearing the end of the three hours of the meeting DW tried to initiate a discussion of demands as they were to appear on the leaflets.  ** made his plea to include “drive the cops out of town.”  && was on stack about three people down with intention of again arguing for our application of the transitional method on all three leaflets.  (Name removed) was becoming tired or frustrated and interrupted the chair, took the floor, and proposed that all three leaflets be commissioned for use in the following fashion:

1)    The leaflet proposed by ## with the slogans (including Labor Black and Brown Drive the Cops out of town) mentioned above would be used to approach the “intelligent workers willing to read a full page and understand the need to drive the cops out of town” as ## had so advocated.

2)    The leaflet edited by &* constructed out of the demand base listed in the HWRS(EC) leaflet –would be distributed via e-mail (with the unspoken expectation that our supporters) will print and distribute their own copies.

3)    The original leaflet with minimal advocacy and the slogan “They Take Us Down-We Shut Them Down” would be used to poster along the 3^rd St. corridor in the Bay View Hunters Point.

Unresolved contradictions in the Ad-Hoc committee

The obvious contradictions and differences between the various tendencies in the Ad-Hoc committee were buried.  The rump HWRS emerged with what they wanted as they had their call to drive the cops out of town approved by the committee without it being discussed.   && had been removed from stack by the chair responding to the wishes of (name removed) to get this part of the meeting over with.  The contradiction that the Ad-Hoc committee will have three faces on the streets thus remains unresolved.  Other contradictions exist in the committee.  (Name removed) is organizing a meeting for the mothers of the victims with the Attorney General of the State of California, an elected capitalist politician.  (Name removed, name removed) and the other “Mothers of Victims” are at a point in their political development where they see no contradiction between their attempt to set off an indefinite general strike, build labor Black and Brown Defense Guards to drive the cops out of town and meeting with the top law enforcement officer of the State of California (to plead for justice, because of their remaining illusions in the courts or illusions in the system or faith in Black Feminist Democrats?)  The contradiction is stark.  The rump HWRS has no problem working with the mothers who have these illusions, nor should they.  But they have scarcely covered their political tracks with ##’s odd moment of self-consciousness, where he advised (name removed) against meeting the attorney general.  To our knowledge the rump HWRS has not tried to convince (name removed) not to hold this meeting.  For the moment we can not stop (name removed)  and the mothers or (Name  removed) from taking this mistaken road, so we must walk alongside them explaining the role of the state and what to expect from the Attorney General and how she will either try to dissuade the mothers from taking action, or contain them in legal institutions, and gather information to be used against the movement when the emergent mothers’ movement does what it must in the streets.

Differences emerge on the application of the Transitional Method 

The real issue here is the understanding of and application of the transitional method.  The rump HWRS now tells us that communists don’t put the transitional program method to work in coalition work.  Instead, in a period where there is no strike wave, where the workers are taking it on the chin or lying down in shock and disbelief at how their lives are being dismantled, the rump HWRS ignores the transitional method of building the bridge linking the workers consciousness where it is now to the advanced demands by abstractly calling for an indefinite general strike and for Labor Black and Brown self-defense guards to drive the police out of town.  This is an excursion into fantasy land or a repetition of the third period Stalinist zigzag into ultraleftism.  No movement has been built, least of all by **.  Not so much as a useful leaflet has been mass produced (to date 6/27/12,) no pedagogy has been prepared for those called into action and no explanation is given to show the masses why fighting for their demands will be effective in affording the oppressed communities relief from police terror.  The masses are supposed to guess or already know.  By their rejection of the demands for organizing unions of the unemployed, free transit, “Cops out of schools!,” etc., no bridge is built between the present consciousness of the masses and the revolutionary transitional demands that satisfy their objective needs.

The rump HWRS ignores how the transitional method is used to build a bridge for the workers so they can come more easily to the understanding of the fact that it is their own self-defense guards that will be tasked with the job of driving the cops out of town.  But the rump HWRS has chosen not to build that bridge.  The workers and community are told, “you do not need the bridge to bring the masses to the understanding that we must build the defense guards, just cross that river any way you can!  We have the program for victory over on this shore.  Get here now.  No bridge is needed, the water is cold and deep but if you swim hard against the current you can attain to our higher understanding. You don’t need the understanding of the first four congresses of the Third International. You don’t need the transitional method of the Fourth International.  Just get with the program.  Get over here and join us because we have the answer!”  The trajectory of the rump HWRS is like that of the Stalinists running from the method of the first four congresses, resulting in their ultra left zigzags during which time they criticized the Trotskyists for using “reformist demands.”

How did Trotsky explain our method?

“….the Fourth International supports every, even if insufficient, demand if it can draw the masses to a certain extent into active politics, awaken their criticism, and strengthen their control over the machinations of the bourgeoisie.”

To the extent that “Cops out of schools,” “Cops out of  Transit,” and “End Stop and Frisk” may be insufficient, they are the demands that have been thrown up by the community after the brutal racist murders executed by school and transit cops.  Indeed 100,000 just marched on 6/17/12 in Harlem calling for an end to “Stop and Frisk.” And on 6/28/12 San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee (ultimately the executioner responsible for killing Kenny Harding Jr.) announced that he will institute the Bloomberg “Stop and Frisk” terror.  So the masses are likely to see things differently than DW and his head carriers.

Of course we understand that these community demands can not be won via bourgeois democratic means; that is why we put them in the system of demands that creates the bridge to the logic of the formation of Labor, Black and Brown defense guards against cops, racists, scabs etc.  The masses still have their illusions, that is why LB&B marched into the Oakland school board after Raheim Brown was murdered and demanded along with the family and community “Cops out of Schools,” while also calling for General Strikes against police murders.  It is the very inclusion of the “lesser” or “insignificant” demands that sparks the question in the worker, “How will we get the cops out of the school, off transit or out of the community?”  This worker when reading a properly constructed leaflet will not have far to go because in the next line it will tell him to form up the defense guard, prepare the indefinite general strike, build your general strike movement with the students, the workers, the unemployed and make their demands your own, i.e., build it together.  That is what the body of the HWRS (EC) leaflet did, yet the rump HWRS reject this method.

In the discussions with the SWP leaders about the Transitional method, Trotsky put it this way:  “This transitional program must include the most simple demands.”   Further along in the discussion he explains, “…to find the connecting links and lead the masses to the idea of the revolutionary conquest of power.  That is why some demands appear very opportunistic-because they are adapted to the actual mentality of the workers.  That is why other demands appear to be too revolutionary because they reflect more the objective situation than the actual mentality of the workers.  It is our duty to make this gap between objective and subjective factors as short as possible….” (our emphases)  Trotsky’s method was neither that of Jack Barns and the reformist SWP which advocates  bringing minimal demands to coalition work, telling workers that the revolutionary  program is in The Militant (of course it would also disappear from the Militant,)  nor was Trotsky’s’ method  that of  ** and ## who advocate maximum demands in the coalition work, abandoning the need to shorten the gap between the objective and subjective factors!

Trotsky, long ago talked about the rump HWRS in the Transitional Program, “Political events are for them an occasion for comment but not for action.  Since sectarian, as in general every kind of blunderer and miracle-man, are toppled by reality at each step, they live in a state of perpetual exasperation, complaining about “the regime” and “the methods” and ceaselessly wallowing in small intrigues.  In their own circles they customarily carry on a regime of despotism.  The political prostration of the sectarian serves to complement shadowlike, the prostration of opportunism, revealing no revolutionary vistas.  In practical politics, sectarians unite with opportunists, particularly with centrists, every time in the struggle against Marxism.”

The rump HWRS fixation on the reformist nature of the demands “cops out of schools” is truly factional in content.  Rump HWRS adherents @@ and ## were active in Labor Black and Brown which in a leaflet released 12/6/12  during the build up to the community port shut down made the following statement of demand:

“We say cops out of our communities, out of our schools, off our campuses!  (bold added)Build labor Black and Brown self defense guards against racist attacks, against la migra, against police brutality; against scabs taking union jobs and to defend the #occupy activists!”

 

Back to the plethora of accusations against the EC

3)    Accusation:  “&& practically bragged about his method and position on work in the trade unions. He spells out clearly that in his view, it is acceptable, and practically imperative, that we participate jointly with open supporters of the Democratic Party in slates and caucuses in the unions. This right-wing position was never the position of HWRS or our organization in the 1990s. It is a basic ABC principle that one never runs union slates or creates union caucuses with open supporters of the Democratic Party, which is openly bourgeois, and one of the two dominant imperialist parties in the US.

1. Response:  We never said this.  We never said any thing of the sort. This is a bold faced lie.

1. Once again this is a like a Spartacist.  He advocates a formula for building caucuses in the unions which are replicas of the party in all but name. This is a sectarian departure from our traditions. What is open in all our caucus work is that we reject bourgeois politics.

4)    Accusation:  “&& ran for office in his union, CAPS, as part of a three-person slate in which one of the other two members (@#) openly stated in his candidate statement that he supported a Democratic Party politician’s position opposing a law to make it easier for unions to organize.”

1. Once this came to our attention we educated @# and he changed his attitude toward the card check bill, coming around to supporting the reform.

5)    Accusation:  “If anyone committed a crime, it is comrade &&, who hid his alliance with an anti-communist, anti-union, pro-Democratic Party slate member from HWRS. && either never put @#’s candidate statement on his CAPS caucus website, or removed it after finding out that we had discovered what he did. In joining a union slate with @#, && compromised HWRS’s principles, and hid from us that he had done so.”   See response below.

6)    Accusation: “&& was always the right wing of the organization. Now he is running away from discussions on the differences, claiming to be “HWRS,” and adopting political positions that contradict and are hostile to the historic method of HWRS, and to a great extent the Liaison Committee’s own principles.”  See response below.

** Demands voter registration card check of the rank and file before he can struggle alongside them!

We carried out four campaigns in our trade union work in California in recent years.  It is difficult to say which case in particular ** refers to, so we will address them all.  How do we approach workers with whom we may do joint work?  ** suggests that when a worker comes to a communist for help they must first pass the card check and prove they are not capitalist political agents disguising themselves as workers aiming to disgrace the revolutionary vanguard.   This is not something we ever considered when workers approached us to take up their cause.  **’s sectarianism on this score puts him in collision with all communist trade union work in American history.  A worker has to be a communist before we invite him to support our caucus program–this is Loony Tunes.  ** tells the worker before we help you fight for anything you must stand on one foot balance yourself on a stack of Communist Manifestos and burn your voter registration card!  If && has the blood of the working class on his hands it’s from bandaging and carrying the wounded whom ** abandoned for the sake of his ivory tower purity.

A few facts would help to dispel the accusations numbered  3-6, to the extent that they deserve  answers.

1)    Prior to doing joint work against the school closures (whoops, another reform) alongside but not in the Progressive Teachers of Richmond, we did not do voter registration cards checking on their members or spokespersons.  Indeed, as we did this work the branch was kept up to date and knew that rank and file activist += was a supporter of Obama.  && reported at a meeting that she went to his inauguration!  ** said nothing about breaking relations with her and indeed pressed that we have contact meetings with her.  Her closest co-conspirator in the teachers was a member of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party.  Communists of various stripes will always be competing to win left-moving rank and file activists and many of them will be card-carrying Democrats with illusions.  Our work there is well documented both in the IT and at the HWRS website.

2)    During our work with the United Public Workers For Action we fought for class independence as a principle, arguing that capitalist politicians not be featured speakers at public forums, but that like other workers if they chose to speak from the floor they would be afforded those rights.  Our making this fight led the Democrats and their supporters (either CP or Social Democrats) to leave the group and the Greens were denied a platform as a bourgeois party.  As a result we established the class independence of UPWA needed to initiate the “Expropriate Chevron” demonstration in Richmond, CA, where a few of the Greens sheepishly tagged along.  Seventh graders with bullhorns from the local schools were screaming at Chevron, “Give us the money!”  This would not have been possible had we not fought for class independence.  Did we ask the kids’ parents if they were card carrying Democrats?  No.  Has the UPWA backtracked since the HWRS pulled back from this work?  We think it has and the HWRS (EC) is taking this fight!  The rump HWRS ignores and abandons the fight for class independence in ad-hoc workers’ formations!

3)    When the furloughs hit and we organized the Inter-Union Organizing Committee, we fought for independent political action, statewide State Workers Strikes, we took street action and propagandized the workers that the type of strike action we need requires that we take back our unions and that the immediate task is to form class struggle caucuses in our unions and fight for control of our unions. We organized “Furlough Friday” pickets and mobilized workers for multiple press conferences.  We filled an inter-union-community bus to protest in Sacramento, delivering our class struggle message to hundreds of SEUI 1000 members, angering the bureaucracy which attempted to stop our leafleting.  Did we check the workers voter registration cards to see if they were in any of the bosses political parties? No-of course not.  We were marching alongside the workers helping them to see the contradictions so they could make the break from the capitalist parties!

4)    When the CAPS election period came up  in August, 2011, we felt that we could not continue to tell other workers to fight for control of their own unions and not do the same ourselves.  So we adopted the California State Workers Caucus program which we had developed with the Iowa Fighting Union Caucus and other state and public workers and applied it to the CAPS union, broadening it to include CAPS-specific demands and initiated a campaign.  We did not do a voter registration card check on the workers who chose to join our slate.  We showed them the program. We told them we are socialists, and explained that the campaign was to expose and remove Blanning and Baker and to establish democratic decision-making via regular membership meetings, so that we could put a class struggle program before the membership and advocate for it.  To this day we have not done a voter registration card check on the other candidates.  We ran on a common slate, on a program that called on labor to break with the Democratic and other capitalist parties, a program that called for labor black and brown self-defense guards to protect the communities from police violence.   It was not our concern what political party the individual workers had registered in before, as our concern was that the caucus called for political independence of organized labor.  This was agreed upon. And even if we had not won 25% of the votes cast(!) this would have stood as a conquest for our movement!

5)    Is @# an open Democrat?  Frankly, I don’t know.  I don’t know how ** thinks he knows.  ** may surmise from the quotation he cited in his letter of 6/25/12 that @# is a Democrat.  In that statement @# announced his support for the veto of the union enrollment card check bill by Governor Jerry Brown.  As this veto was supported by many Republicans, Independents and Democrats, it is hard to say how @#’s support of the veto turns him into an “open Democrat.”  Indeed some communists like the IBT opposed the EFCA because it included binding arbitration.  There are often components of reform bills which deny rights while offering others.  The right wing had a campaign of disinformation which claimed the card check bill would expose the worker in front of his co-workers and boss as to if he/she filled out the union card.  @# fell victim to this propaganda.

6)    What is important is that @# had a bad position on the card check bill and that when it finally came to our attention we removed his statement from the caucus blog and asked @# how he came to that position, because it was against a reform which would have been beneficial to labor.  @# sent us the Wikipedia information upon which he originally based his decision.  In turn && sent @# the entire bill and explained that it did not deny individual privacy rights, as the right wing Wikipedia article said.  And in turn @# retracted his old position and then withdrew from the caucus.  Of course the card check legislation is a reform and as the rump HWRS does not support any reforms, clearly they were not concerned with @#’s position on the card check bill, but rather were using the quotation from @# to ascertain his voter registration and thereby label him an “Open Democrat.”

7)    Their sole aim in this exercise was to denounce && for class collaboration and tainting the image of HWRS.  Had @# stated that he supported the card check bill (as he does now,) ** would have denounced us for working with a reformist!  Unlike **, we have not given up on winning @#.  We are confident that as the contradictions become manifest many workers, just like @#, will break from their illusions and become revolutionaries.  Needless to say if we thought otherwise our entire project would be nothing less than an exercise in futility!

8)    When you work with real workers you find out they have many contradictions. You find out they are misinformed, they do not have all the tools to always discern and understand the class line, they will make mistakes, they will go in many directions which may counter the interests of the class.  The ** method is to throw these workers to the side instead of patiently explaining and showing them their mistakes; showing them the value of our program, of class independence and drawing them deeper into the struggle where their contradictions will be exposed so that they can shed their illusions.  ** is so afraid of being tainted by the illusions of the working class that he runs from radicalizing workers in CAPS and in SYRIZA, but does not apply the same method when it comes to the specially-oppressed, as in the case of (name removed) taking the Mothers of victims of police murder to visit the California Attorney General.

9)    The claim that && deliberately hid either @#’s campaign statement or his voter registration from the organization is a lie.  The fact is that following the battery of &&’s person at the offices of CAPS, the demands on his time and attention grew exponentially due to the fact that we (the caucus and supporters) were burning the midnight oil trying to cobble together an e-mail list of the membership.  &&’s time allocation was further complicated because a harassment charge was placed on &&, and he needed to respond in court.  && was discovering and compiling much more information on B&B’s control of CAPS and its operation and this took additional time and attention.  Candidate statements were suddenly due, and as all good procrastinators know, most of these things do not get done until the last moment.  &&’s mistake in the sequence of events leading to the publication of the statement was that he did not give reading @#’s final statement the full attention it deserved prior to posting.

10) CAPS is not even a workers’ organization, let alone a real union.  In due course we discovered what the Executive Director of CAPS and partner in Blanning and Baker, Chris Voight told us at the first informational meeting && attended.  He said “CAPS is not a union like you have for the other workers.  We’re scientists with advanced degrees.  We are a professional association.”   We soon came to discover that CAPS is not an “independent union” as it bills itself, it is actually a profit center for the corporation which organized it in the first place.  CAPS was not organized by a union or by the workers themselves.  The cards were collected by the young Matt Austin who has worked his way up to partner and is thus vested with the financial incentive to protect his enterprise.  CAPS is a company union set up and operated not in the interest of the workers but to assure the profits of Blanning and Baker LLC.  ** agreed with this assessment. The terms captive union and corporate union have come to describe CAPS yet none could call it a workers’ organization, in light of the expose of B&B/CAPS/PECG our campaign has developed into.  This is not bragging. This is fact.  As this is not a workers organization but is identified as a parasitic corporate leech siphoning workers mandated dues dollars into their profit stream.  All means of struggle against them become legitimate.

11) Until ** received the statement of @# supporting the veto of the card check, **’s objection to the work in CAPS was that it wasted too much of &&’s time.  This claim is turned back on to the other comrades (DW’s companion $$ in particular, and @@ the sympathizer,) who during the period of the CAPS campaign and its aftermath maintained their minimal participation in the organization.  The entire claim of waste of time was so that ** could hide the fact that his companion and @@ did so little work in the organization that if && was not doing “it,” (whatever “it” was that ** thought was a priority,) “it” would not happen.  ** knows this as he commented to && many times.  Their level of participation was inconsistent with affiliation in a revolutionary organization.  But even @@, with his consistent practice of blowing off HWRS assignments to attend to his personal dating life, claimed the CAPS work was a waste of time.  When pressed for what && should have been doing instead of organizing with his co-workers, he claimed && should be having contact meetings with 🙂 (##’s son.)  Asked why he didn’t do it with $$ instead, @@ had no answer.  Why? Because neither $$ nor @@ have been serious about party work.  &&, on the other hand, was the only one who sought out and conducted one-on-one with :).

Does this ever end?  Unlikely, despite **’s claim the Faction Fight is over!

** says the faction fight is over.  We will say when it is over when we are done slamming his moth-eaten ignorant sectarian politics. These additional paragraphs are in response to the attacks against us on 6/28/12.

Accusation #1:  “Thus in principle it us wrong to call for a critical support for PFP, that is based primarily on the petty bourgeoisie.”

Accusation #2 “Yet &&’ right wing position in HWRS was most clearly illustrated in a bitter factional fight in April 2010 on how revolutionaries relate to gangs in the black communities.  &&’ position was to call for Defense Guards in the black communities to fight gangs! This is a horrible position….” See #2 below for our response.

The comments ** quotes were a preliminary draft for an internal discussion for the purpose of the examination of the relationship of forces and dynamics where gangs operate.  Nowhere did we say this was the last word on the subject.

1)    **’s attitude toward the PFP is undialectical in the extreme.  Many times tremendous tendency struggles take place within it.   At moments real worker leftists are PFP candidates for office and it is far from excluded for revolutionaries to give them critical support.  What is critical support?  For the Spartacist and their ilk it is support.  For ** it is support. We’re not going to say he is a Spartacist or engage in a debate over what a pound of sugar is, or when A=A, but Lenin’s position on critical support is like the rope supporting the hanging man.  It is supposed to finish off politically tendencies whose time has come and gone. But we think there are two more components to **’s sectarian position on electoral politics.  One is a guilty conscience for having run for office as a PFP candidate in the 1980’s, when the IWP did an entry in the PFP.  And the other is an anarchistic contempt for the right of the franchise.  So the lesson of Trotsky advising Cannon to vote for the CP in the 1940 election means nothing to **.  And at his advanced age it likely never will!

2)    In April of 2010, HWRS had a discussion sparked by a young contact’s precarious relationship with a gang member.  As a consequence of that discussion ** was willing to sacrifice 2/3rds of the female membership of HWRS in an opportunistic accommodation of an ex-RWL black child prodigy, who was by then a teenager in Detroit involved with a gang member who impregnated her and left her.  **’s out of context quotations from && on the subject of gangs were part of &&’s criticism of **’s complete collapse of principle, as he opportunistically adapted to this young woman’s views of the moment.  As a 15 year-old in love with “her man,” this youth developed illusions in the revolutionary potential of the gangs.  Views she changed very shortly thereafter.  As her relationship unraveled around her she had a world of trouble, got an abortion and her parents threatened to move her away out of state.   **’s somersaulting positions alienated the adult working class female members of HWRS who had been in our tendency since the 1990’s, and they left shortly thereafter.  This opportunist adaptation to the amours of a teenager ultimately lost the HWRS two members and did not retain the teenager as a member; she quickly retreated away from the HWRS and into anarcho-feminism.  In that discussion in 2010 we tried to assure comrades that we recognized the difference between the “youth gangsta/hip-hop culture” and the real criminal enterprises.  We also distinguished between the “self-defensive groupings of youth,” some of which are unfairly considered to be gangs, and we recognize that  some of them eventually become transformed into gangs.  ** was so intent of winning this youth that he ignored the class stratification in the gangs and how these enterprises serve as a conduit from the street to the prison or the graveyard, rather than to liberation.  Readers should judge **’s factional remarks in this light.

3)    We say the Black Panther Party was right, membership in the gangs is incompatible with membership in the revolutionary organization.  Unlike DW they understood perfectly well what the gang phenomenon was.  They had no romantic awe of it.  Gang victims were their own family members. The BPP had rules which made gang membership and participation in gang activities incompatible with BPP membership:

“Rule # 6. No party member can join any other army force, other than the Black Liberation Army.”    As gangs are composed of soldiers who protect turf and trade for their gang leaders, to the extent that these gangs are militarized they are an “army” and membership is incompatible with membership in the BPP.  “Rule # 8. No party member will commit any crimes against other party members or black people at all, and cannot steal or take from the people, not even a needle or a piece of thread.”

As gang members engage in pimping, drug trafficking, strong arm robbery, extortion, bullying, murder etc., membership in the BPP is incompatible with these activities.

4)    ** obviously never had opportunity to work with individuals who had survived the gang life only to find their way into the painter union or other building trade.  He never had to work on a plank dozens or hundreds of feet in the air,  putting his life in the hands of a tweeker or someone who had their mind and spirit warped by the gang life, or someone whose very life depended on obeying the gang command structure, paying off the bookie, numbers runner or drug dealer on time.  Those of us in the working class have first-hand experience with workers whose lives have been destroyed by their interactions with gangs or live under threat of gang retribution or violence.  **’s sheltered existence allows him the romanticized view that once the Bloods and the Crips signed a truce, and took pledges against hurting kids and women, the devastating impact of these capitalist criminal enterprises on their own community ceased.  This is sheer fantasy!  **’s knowledge of the gangs is limited to what he reads in the New York Times and what his companion, the judge’s clerk, tells him from her knowledge of the court record.  ** invests the gang bosses in the specially oppressed sectors with proletarian credentials.  He does not distinguish between the street soldiers and the gang bosses. If anyone in the USA has petty bourgeois consciousness ** and his supporters stand at the head of the line.  But how would ** know this?  He spends all day in his house…he has for years.

5)    As materialists we understand the gang phenomenon is not unique to the black and brown communities, it is co-located wherever capitalism exists.  Although criminal gangs predate the capitalist mode of production, today they are a product of capitalist poverty; they emerge out of the desperation of the lumpenproletariat and regardless of the episodic self-defensive and humble beginnings some urban gangs may have had, once a gang descends into capitalist enterprise the laws of commodity circulation take over and the democratic horizontalism of the humble friendly street gang (Bernstein’s mythical Sharks and Jets) turns into a vertical, pyramid structure, reproducing the same relations found in capitalist enterprises.  With one small difference.  If you work for Big Pharma and you miss a delivery you get fired.  If you work for the gang and miss a delivery you’re dead.

6)     Consider how ** poses both question and answer setting his opponent up and cutting him down without leaving room for deeper reflection: “I need to ask && point blank: forget about our disagreement on the precise nature of gangs in the black community, you must answer if you support the formation of defense guards in the community that will not only defend it against the cops and the state but also against gangs. If your answer is yes, you propose a bloodshed in the community of huge proportion (taking into account also how the FBI, Cops, CIA would love it and manipulate it). I think that we all agree to the need to raise workers defense of the black community against cops and the state. If we include gangs in the formulation, we will not only have a bad position but potentially a real reactionary position.”

What ** misses here is that regardless of whether we pose the question in our propaganda or not, the dynamic will be the same.  When the class struggle erupts and the multi-racial workers militia emerge, layers in the gangs may come to their side but there is no material reason to believe that those whose profit base involves extortion, trafficking etc., will abandon their enterprises. When the class war erupts it will not leave the gangs unscathed, and when the defectors come to the side of the working class, who will defend the defectors from the gangs?  That job falls to the working class. Contrary to **’s false construct, we are not calling for a race war or for the state to crush the gangs.  We are showing that the task of protecting the community and those who run from the gangs will fall on the shoulders of the workers and oppressed communities armed in their own self defense!  ** postulates that defense of the community from the gangs will provoke the state to intervene, this line of reasoning blames the actions of the state on those who are constructing the liberation army.  This is ludicrous!   Suppose we ask ** why,  given that gangs are just another capitalist enterprise which exploits young workers, why don’t you call for labor to organize local unions of gang workers so they can get on the books, get covered by social security, OSHA protection against hazards on the job, have medical benefits, a 401K plan, burial insurance etc.,! Of course not! That would be reformist! (according to him!) ** must answer does he want to condemn these gang workers to bad conditions, low wages and subterranean prospects, or is really a hero of the oppressed, prepared to lead the struggle of  the most oppressed for liberation?  In the July 16^th coalition his co-factionalist deleted the demand to organize unions of the unemployed from their draft leaflet.

7)    **’s standard method to smear someone is that he presents information out of context and divorces parts of an argument from the whole, and in so doing presents an entirely skewed picture of his opponent’s argument.  This was his method of attacking the programmatic statement in the HWRS(CE) July 16^th leaflet (attacking the demands he considered reformist, like “Cops off transit,” etc. while ignoring that they were being used to build a transitional bridge to the demands for LB&B self defense guards, etc.   As you have seen above, ** attempts to smear us with quotes taken out of context, which he has elaborated on in his missive intended to destroy our street credibly with contacts in Labor Black and Brown and our relationship with internationalists.   We restate our arguments from that 2010 discussion here:

“…  I think ** romanticizes gang activities as if its just a few kids on the street doing what they need to do to get by and that those activities are the same as a worker working in a toxic industry.   The only difference Dov sees is that the crop duster poisons millions for big Agra business (most likely without knowing the consequences of his actions) and the street soldier for the gang sees the results of his work when he has to break knees to get paid, or he watches a junkie nod out from an overdose, or he sprays bullets into the wrong house during a drive by shooting.   The quantity of human suffering created by capitalism outweighs the misery inflicted by the gangs a thousand fold yet we need not romanticize them.

Gang activities are not just a few kids selling dime bags on the corner for themselves. Although gangs come in all shapes and sizes when they get past the level of the isolated neighborhood crew (and the isolated crew is generally brought into a bigger outfit once it shows its bones) there are major gangs with thousands of members and pyramid structure where the street soldiers are expendable and the guys at the top live the sweet life.  Many of the top gangsters interpenetrate with the organized crime outfits, legitimate business, and corrupt cops and politicians.  Like those subject to the economic draft doing imperialism’s dirty work the local kids who join the gangs instead of  the military end up serving the local kingpin although he may think he is serving his street buddies and neighbors who protect him.  There may be some level of brotherly love in the crew but bottom line is, if a guy crosses the boss your friend from down the block is the same guy putting a bullet in your head at the bosses’ direction.

Standard practices for gangs include homicide, extortion, loan sharking, intimidation, home invasions, strong arm robbery, prostitution, numbers racquets, cons, random murder for initiation etc. These are not comparable to the work of someone in a toxic chemical or even radioactive industry.  Rather these are the types of acts that mercenaries take on.  The same way we differentiate between a worker and a cop or prison guard (who also looks at the economy and says “I have no choice but to be a cop…”) we should differentiate between a worker and an enforcer for the gang.

Gangs are not only a black issue nor should the discussion of gangs and organized crime be limited to the conditions in the black community. We could consider the starvation situation in the former USSR where millions died during the restoration.  In those conditions many youth found no option but to join the Russian mob.  They had no option…hell even if they went to work they weren’t getting paid.

So the Russian mob flourished being able to provide where the economy could not.  We must not ignore the anti-working class nature of gangs just because there is a unique interrelationship between the gangs that spring up in the ghettos of America and institutional racism. Gangs interpenetrate with organized crime and rarely come out on the side of the working class.  The mob has traditionally been a relatively fascist institution with sympathy for the most brutal forms of capitalism enforced with the psychopathic violence that one learns in gangs and militarized organizations.

There may have been a momentary truce during the Rodney King (RIP) riots but that temporary unity against the cops turned quickly back into internecine warfare. And despite the racial component of gangs in the black community it is not been shown that the gangs are the armed wing of the fight against capitalism, making them qualitatively different than the gangs in the Russian, Jewish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, or white Motorcycle communities. If someone thinks that there is a qualitative difference between the black gangs and other gangs because of the unique history of the African American,  I am willing to entertain that possibility.   But not before we clearly look at the entire role of the gang, their structure, what they do to the community.  If they are perpetuated by the pigs (as ** says*) then they serve to drive the young men into the jails and destroy the community.   If this is so then it needs to be said.  Is this what your are saying(?): The gangs are infiltrated by the pigs to keep the young black men shooting at each other and funneling the youth to prison?  If this is your prognosis then we need to test it and expose it.

…if we are going to talk seriously about this we have to look at gang structure, territorial issues, the rampant violence against working class and poor communities committed by the gangs, the role they play in keeping the people drugged for the man, the issue of Balkanization of the poor communities, issues of enforcement (gang law,)  random violence, intimidation, inter-racial rivalry, and the intention and ideology adopted by the gangs.

The worker who delivers chemicals to the farm for his living may be destroying the planet but he does not know that.  The gang member who does a drive by shooting knows exactly what he is  doing.   This is not an issue of blaming the innocent who starts working for the gang and slowly gets sucked in.  This is an issue of examining what is and not romanticizing the cannibalism that capitalism drives the most oppressed to commit.  Who could blame the survivor at the death camps for what ever vile act they had to commit to survive?  Surely none of us would, but we do not ignore the crimes of the Capos who knowingly herded their Jewish brethren into the ovens. These gang bangers, from all races white, black, brown, Asian knowingly herd their brethren into the ovens.”

As the conditions of capitalism worsen we have seen the enormous growth in gang warfare.  Look at Mexico today where thousands of innocents are murdered.  Were they innocents?  Were they just your average person who had a little relationship, doing a little favor, once in a while for the wrong entity, and then their entire family ends up dead as a message and every one knows what it means?   In Brazil  (Rio in particular,) the gangs controlled the crime (mainly drugs) in the favelas until the cops moved in and took down the local bosses, making themselves the new kingpins and taking a “tax” on everything, not just drugs.  Only labor and community self-defense can protect those communities from the twin violence of the police army and the gang army, by advancing the class struggle to the defeat of the capitalist state.  As the conditions of capitalist decay advance in the first world they will replicate those in the third world.

In the 2010 discussion we wrote:

“This discussion can get out of hand really quickly and I think it is important to clarify what we agree on and where we may not fully agree.

1)  We all agree on the need for black/worker self defense from the cops the racists and on the picket lines.

2)  We all agree that the permanently dispossessed have no real ability to make choices, even though (our youth contact from Detroit) informs us that “her man” has made the choice to be in “the life.”  We know that most people have been stripped of their ability to choose because capitalism takes the choices away and most of the dispossessed youth do not have the training or facility to know what choices there are, so they “choose” what they know…the corner, the street, the local gang who protect the block.

3) We all agree that the origin of the black gang was self defense in the 1940’s, and following the mob’s taking on of the heroin-trade, the black and Puerto Rican gangs became subcontractors to the Mafia and acted as the transmission belt of the heroin trade into the black community.  We all agree that the mob was CIA-protected and in the Vietnam period spread the heroin trade deeper into the black and minority communities. mostly as subcontractors to the Mafia.  We also agree that the cointelpro was very happy to destroy the black community with the heroin trade and that the black gangs of the late 60’s and early 70’s played into that role.  We also agree that the CIA and Ollie North turned the cocaine trade into the crack war against the black and brown communities in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

4) We all agree that only a turn to the politics of revolution by the gang members is the only way to end this destructive behavior.  We also agree that downturns in gang warfare during the rise of the BPP and in the post Rodney King rebellion period are indicators that some gang members can be won to unity in action around class struggle actions.  But we have not discussed the implication that during the truce in the early 90’s the poisoning of the neighborhoods continued.  So the truce that brought the homicides down did not stop the drug trade (the primary role of the gangs.)

We don’t agree that:

1) The worker in the chemical industry or the fertilizer industry is aware that his work is killing the planet.  Some do, most do not.  Most in these industries believe their bosses that the work they are doing is safe…until they get sick.

2) 80% of young black males are unemployed….the real figure is about 48%.

3) Hooliganism and gangsterism are not the same.  Football fights are not football gangsterism they are football hooliganism.  Gangsterism is based on control of turf for business needs, in other words it has a material basis for the bloodletting.

4) The gangs are capitalist enterprises with bosses and street soldiers.  The street soldier does not have a democratic say in what the gang does or does not do. The street soldier takes orders and carries them out to earn his bones.

5) “As the struggle advances the gangs will donate their guns and energy to fight the common enemy through the class struggle.” (As ** said.)   This is not at all based on the material interests of the gangs.   There may be sections of the gang that choose to come to the side of the working class and there may be temporary alliances against the cops and the military, but the leadership and the top ranks of the gang will be fighting to hold onto their  position of  power and wealth.   The socialist revolution will destroy the material basis for the gang industry, and for that reason the gangs/mobs have typically not sided with the revolution.   There will be no factory councils of gang workers organizing the Tupac Shakur brigades for clean gang practices.  The gangs make their living from anti-working class criminality and the defeat of the gang leaders and the dissolution of the gangs will be part of the revolutionary process and a task taken up by the black/worker militia that ** thinks the gangs will arm.

6) That the method of argumentation by non-analogous phenomenon is valid.  ** poses the question: should we ban football because European working class youth sometimes kill each other?  Of course we don’t have the state power to ban football,  and if we did the alienation and misery that ** describes will be addressed and the youth will slowly stop fighting at football matches.   **’s question taunts us to call for the banning of gangs which during the rule of capital would be tantamount to calling on the bourgeois state to crack down on the ghetto, and we are not foolish enough to fall into that trap.  But with the seizure of power by the working class the task of the destruction of the gangs will be right up there with expropriation of the bourgeoisie, because they play no socially progressive role and are destructive organizations poisoning the black community.  Because the gangs are not productive there is nothing to expropriate, no factory to occupy, nothing but their guns to seize (unless they already turned them over to the revolution.)  When an institution is totally parasitic there is nothing to seize.  For example what is the value of the credit default swaps after the revolution….about the same as they are now…valueless paper.  So the analogy equating the violence of the alienated youth at the football match to the violence of the gangs is a false equation.  The gangs fight for real material gain not to let off steam.

Maybe we agree or don’t agree:

1) If a gang member asks to join the HWRS do we allow them to join if they keep their “job”?  Is it okay to sling by day and propagandize at night?  I postulate that the work they do for a living is against proletarian morality and is incompatible with membership in our organization.  Does ** agree?  If so then we both agree that the basic work of the gang members is anti-social, anti-working class and that making this statement is not a concession to “yellow journalism.” (sic)  

2) We would recruit members of the military and help them organize inside the imperialist gang, why not the gang worker?   I postulate that if we recruit the gang member he has to leave the employ of the gang but if we recruit a soldier in the imperialist army we keep them there to undermine the state.”

It is in this context and understanding of the class stratification of the gangs and their role in the community that we come to the conclusion that when the class struggle produces real Labor Black & Brown, or even just Black and Brown or even just Black self-defense guards, their ranks will swell at the expense of the gangs.  The street soldiers with an eye to a better tomorrow will attempt to break free of their bondage and join the army of liberation.  However the upper layers of the gang, those with the big time connections and the big time commitments, those who pay to play and are played by bigger players, will find they have a war of attrition on their hands and they will bring that war to the streets.  It will be precarious to walk away from the gang command structure and join the liberation army.  The result will be determined by the relationship of forces and the ability of the class struggle to win the most oppressed away from bondage to the criminal enterprises which offer them sustenance when capitalism cannot.  The liberation army will find itself defending its new recruits from their old generals, colonels and majors.  In very concrete terms the multi-racial self-defense guards will be the vehicle that drives not only the cops and the fascists, but the gang bosses and their army of thugs out of town.

Those like ** who lie to the masses and ignore the role of the gang bosses will find no quarter in the community.

* editors  note, 6/29/2012:  We point this out because we have never heard ** use the word ‘pig’ in the past, yet now in his opportunistic adaptation to what he thinks our young contacts want to hear he drops his usual usage of the term “cops” and replaces it with “pigs.” Talk about demagoguery!

By the HWRS (EC) 6/30/12

Appendix 1.

Received E-Mail on 6/29/12 from E G (whose SWP membership dated from the 50’s and whom DW either referred to as a good old Bolshevik or a rotten centrist depending on the moment.)

A few comments on Comrade R’ position on building caucuses:  To include/ exclude supporters of the Democratic Party from union caucuses is a practical question every revolutionary worker in a union has to face. Today many militant workers I know oppose the Democratic Party, but advocate a vote for it as a “lesser evil.”

So the issue is a dialectical question of our interaction with a contradictory working class rather than a question of our “purity.”

I think we should all agree that a union caucus should have as a minimum a class struggle program.  Such a program needs to include defying laws against strikes passed by Democratic Party politicians and injunctions by Democratic Party judges.  But REAL workers are not always consistent and sometimes will oppose the actions of the Democratic Party politicians while continuing to vote for the Democratic Party.

A caucus is NOT a revolutonary party.  Nor should it be a front for a revolutionary party.  A caucus should be an arena of political struggle.  As we know, most unions don’t even allow  critical political discussion in their meetings.   We need a forum for debate to express revolutonary ideas, rather than just announcing them on laaflets.  Of course, if we struggle for our ideas, it will probably will lead to splits within caucuses.  Such splits are healthy if they derive from the struggle.

The revolutionary party is  in a contradictory role with the working class…..the challenge for us is the unity and struggle of these opposites.

As the crisis deepens, there will be opportunities “to take over” unions.  ISO is already part of the bureaucracy of several caucuses which took over unions solely on the basis of “union democracy.”  But we should beware trying to similar form alliances with Democratic Party supporters to take over unons… which may be tempting to comrades.  We can only educate the working class from below….not from above.  However, we may initially need unity with Democratic Party militants in order to later split with them.

EG

Appendix 2: How CD overlooked reformism and DW saved him from his mistake.

A compendium of emails in a thread in reverse order:

(Last in the thread)

All slogans are over-simplifications.  Transitionall demands require new transitional organizations. Otherwise, slogans are phrase mongering. Many “trotskyists” (not Trotsky) have substituted slogans at the bottom of a leaflet for program.  Educating and organizing the masses requires much more than a list of slogans.     In Bolivia the POR under Lora came up with the slogan “dictatorship of the proletariat.”   Programatically correct, but immediatley irrelevant to the situation.  The proletarian dictatorship is after the revolution…not before.

Of course, worker defense guards are needed.  Who will form them?  The unions as they are now constituted?  More than unlikely.  We need to emphasize the need for workers assemblies, steward councils, neighborhood asambleas populares to act independently and separately from bourgeois power.  The working class understands SELF-DEFENSE….slogans, actions should derive from that.

EG