[Marxism] A regrettable incident of exclusionism

[Fred Feldman]

I have no idea what, if anything, the Canadian CL (which means the
indispensable leader of the Canadian CL as of all communists, except the
accidental and completely unexplainable Cubans, Jack Barnes) means about
violence-baiting by Ernie Tate.  I am sure Ernie didn't do anything of the
kind but I wonder if he has any idea what incident or controversy they claim
to base this on. They don't have to cite any facts, because the facts are
obliged by revolutionary centralist norms and proletarian morality to be
what they say they are.

As far as I can see, that's all there is to it.  The homogeneous SWP must
have a homogeneous milieu (otherwise the homogeneity of the sect will be
disrupted by debates emerging from the milieu).  Forums therefore are not
free-speech meetings, as they were in the Cannon-Dobbs era and beyond.  They
are gatherings for the homogeneous and those whom the homogeneous think can
be won to their common views without resistance or debate.

I was expelled in 1999 for an article critical of party policy in the Mumia
fight.  In the course of it, I suggested that (1) there was a tendency for
branches to try to get around the sectarian stance of the leadership, and
carry out a policy that was not the same as the one being imposed from the
center. (2) That it was being done this way rather than by open challenge,
because people were increasingly afraid to differ and so maneuvered to make
things a little less sectarian. (3) That organizational problems can result
from political errors, and can't necessarily be resolved by simply
"correcting" organizational misbehavior, and (4)that the membership could be
right, and were in this case, in tending to resist the leadership line
whether openly or covertly.

This was deliberately distorted as a call for indiscipline and thus as
grounds for expulsion.  More precisely, what I had done was to assert a
right of the membership to revolt.

Well this article was critical, very inadequately so, and also a bit
sectarian about the Mumia fight, adapting to the leadership even while
attempting to modify their course.  And the whole thing was written in the
framework of support for the "third campaign for the turn" which was
presented as aimed at toward a broad regroupment of revolutionary forces.
I suppose, in retrospect, that the article was an attempt to test the
open-ness that the leadership claimed to be advocating.  Well, I found out!

This was the smallest preconvention discussion in the history of the party.
there were only two articles by party members (mine and a short item from a
young comrade who was later expelled) aside from denunciations of me by the
top leaders. Most of the members were smarter than I was.  They knew the
score.  They knew that their only task was to "absorb" and help implement
the new line, and that expressing individual opinions in the bulletin would
be asking for trouble. Nobody had to tell them that. There was the party
complete with party line and there was the door.  That was the only choice
you got to make.

I am actually somewhat embarrassed by the article I wrote today.  As far as
I am concerned, its main achievement was getting me out of the party. For
that I can only thank whatever mischievous imp was operating in my brain
when I wrote it. 

The scuttlebut is that I was excluded from forums in 2001 for allegedly
threatening violence against the party leadership including Barnes.  I had
overamped in a way that list members are familiar with in a couple of
critical letters in my none-too-fruitful seventeen year effort to reform the
party (well, I learned a lot from it, anyway) in a way list members are
familiar with, but I had said nothing that threatened or implied violent
action by myself. All this was linked to the 9/ll which required ever-more
discipline, centralization, and homogeneity, including in supposedly public
meetings. (They really might as well be held in the catacombs.) 

So, apparently on the grounds that I might shoot Barnes from the balcony at
one of his marathon meetings and leap to the stage shouting "Sic Semper
Tyrannis!" my viewpoint was barred from the forums. Being barred from forums
helped me reorient more to the real world, such as it is, although I admit
that I feel bad about not being able to pay my respects at meetings like the
one for Harry Ring and other comrades for whom I had deep respect, just as
John does about being barred from the meeting from the inspiringly
determined and strong and loyal comrade Robert Simms.

Barnes insisted that the turn and all that was eliminating the
semi-sectarian existence of the past, and getting us onto the broad highway
of "mass work" (basically work in industry and sales to coworkers).  We are
"getting out of the phone booth" he said. Yet every step in the process
meant more and more narrowness and talking in fact to ever fewer people,
listening less and handing out the line with iron discipline, and so on.
Listening to fewer and fewer people, and in many cases, listening less and
less above all to yourself, except from the point of view of policing your
own thoughts.

I think Barnes had lots of illusions about what he was doing as he carried
this out but it is clear that he has settled into a comfortable life with
the results. As more and more people who couldn't keep their thoughts to
themselves were tossed out of the phone booth and forced -- many of us
kicking and screaming  -- into the open air, the  new homogenized phone
booth began to seem like a pretty nice place to Barnes and others.  Really
it was a pretty nice place once the unhomogenized and immoral and
rightward-moving and nonproletarian elements were thrown out.

So the SWP settled for the duration into the phone-booth existence.  And,
just to be on the safe side, they tore out the phone.

This is a reminiscence, not primarily a political statement even though it
includes some of my views, and I hope it does not inspire a dreary polemic.
Fred Feldman