Report on week 6 of Solidarity’s class series on Problems of Socialist Organization: The Revolution that Didn’t Happen
BY IVAN DRURY ZARIN
The timeframe for the sixth class in the Problems of Socialist Organization series was the 1960s and 70s in the United States, a period that saw a major youth radicalization and the proliferation of socialist organizations and proto-parties. It was a period that was propelled by a tremendous rage against the existing capitalist, imperialist order, and an optimism that (in the language of a later radicalization) a better world was possible, and even that a revolutionary situation might be around the corner.
When that revolution didn’t happen, and, instead, capital successfully regrouped and reorganized locally and globally, the effects were devastating for the revolutionary left. I think David F made a good point near the end of the discussion when he said that it would be ridiculous to blame the ’60s generation for not managing to make a socialist revolution in the United States, but that they do bear at least some responsibility for leaving the socialist left in a worse state than they inherited it. The disorganized state of the revolutionary left at the dawn of the neoliberal era is a problem that we’re still suffering today.
There was a lot of interest in continuing that sort of critical evaluation amongst the three dozen or so people who were on the call. More than a few people commented that there was not enough time to discuss all the problems that came up through the readings and from Dianne’s presentation that introduced the discussion. That had been true of every discussion in this class series: we never had the time to do more than scratch the surface of the problems and lessons of each historical period and struggle we were studying. But it was doubly true for this discussion, because of the immediate relevance of the unfinished histories that are still so close to us, and because the histories of the ’60s generation of socialist organizations has not been conclusively written. When Paul L suggested that we organize a conference on the lessons and legacies of ’60s socialism, there were a lot of ‘thumbs up’ in the chat.
Dianne Feeley, editor of Against the Current magazine, Solidarity National Committee member, and former member of the Socialist Workers Party – US, tackled this massive, thorny topic with a historical presentation that wove social and political history with her own revolutionary biography. You can watch a video of her excellent presentation here, and listen to a recording here; it’s well worth a listen as a primer for the necessary discussions about this time, and also as an introduction to the readings included in the syllabus for this week.
Getting interested in feeling responsible
Dianne began with a story about how she first got involved in protests and radical politics. “The first action I was ever involved in was a picket in support of civil rights activists,” she said. She said she remembered feeling nervous and out of place when she arrived at that demonstration alone. And that she remembers that feeling when she goes to protests now, looking out for new people who might be feeling like she did that day.
“Later, as a member of Catholic Worker,” she said, “I was involved in a civil disobedience action. We were scared of the police attacking us, but when they finally did, they arrested 50 people and that was it.” The point was that “it was the first time I felt that we, as a minority, could change society. And I started to get interested in how to do that.”
“Getting interested” in how to make change was a theme that rang out throughout her presentation. I was struck that this sentiment also echoed frustrations and motivations people expressed in the readings this week, and that others shared in discussion as well. This desire for change was one expression of an general undercurrent that ran through this week’s discussion, which was not so foregrounded in previous weeks: feelings.
Dianne said it was the feeling of being “responsible for injustice,” that motivated her to get involved in the Vietnam antiwar movement. She said it was then feeling urgent desperation to do “whatever it took to end the war” that led her to join the Socialist Workers Party. I was struck by the similarity of this sentiment to what Bernadine Dohrn said in “Mother Country Radicals” podcast hosted by her son Zayn, when she said she’d “follow anyone who said they knew how to stop the war.” Also, in the small group I was part of for discussion, Wendy said she decided to join a socialist group in 1968 after telling someone recruiting her that she’d do whatever it took to end racism.
These feelings had a positive content because they motivated everyday people to transform themselves into political actors through the actions that flow from political commitment. This must have been the case for millions of people who joined anti-war demonstrations, civil rights and Black Power actions, and provided extralegal supports in pursuit of womens’ reproductive freedom. In my small group discussion, Kay referred to the confluence of these many movements as an interfacing of movements. Most people stayed involved in one or another of these movements, often while expressing solidarity with other movements that also solidarized with theirs. All together, this lattice of movements produced what is popularly understood as the ’60s movement, or ’60s generation generally.
From feeling to thinking, and strategic action
As she became a revolutionary socialist, Dianne took these feelings a step further, from transmuting urgent desperation for change into activism, to a deeper, more profound transformation. What she described as she got involved in the Socialist Workers’ Party was the process of abstracting feeling into thought through Marxist analysis that punched through the appearances of crises of war, racism, and misogyny to find a common root in a system of capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. This Marxist analysis demanded a different set of activities: not tactics designed to pressure the US government to make this or that reform, but strategic actions that aimed at building revolutionary organization and power through these same immediate campaigns.
Dianne said, “I realized my job should be convincing others to end the war. This meant becoming a political activist rather than becoming a victim of the effort to stop the war.” The SWP put forward clear slogans about how to stop the war, and helped organize practical actions in the anti-war movement including teach-ins, sit-ins, rallies, and an endless number of other activities. The basic premise of the SWP’s anti-war strategy was that only a mass movement in the US could assist the Vietnamese National Liberation Front to end the war.
Critical to carrying out the SWP’s mass movement strategy was a sober assessment of who the SWP represented, and who it did not. Dianne said, “As this radicalization increased, we saw other autonomous groups holding demonstrations and contingents that fed into the mass movement.” The SWP correctly saw that “one of the ways that we built a mass movement was that specific autonomous contingents could participate without having to give up their particular demands or perspectives.”
“Alongside the anti-war movement, other movements developed: the free speech movement for the right to expression on campuses. Indigenous movements that occupied Alcatraz,” Dianne said. “Each one of them had their own rhythm, all composing the total movement.”
The SWP was not the only or most important organization in the anti-war movement, but, as a revolutionary socialist organization, it did make a meaningful contribution to that movement by recognizing its strengths, as well as the gaps in what it represented socially, and invest earnestly in cooperation with those other forces.
Adding organization to spontaneous struggle
The interfacing movements that grew up around the Vietnam anti-war movement and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements developed according to their own rhythms. Some were organized by movement groups, like during Freedom Summer, the campaign to bring white students to the south for voter registration drives and to support Black struggle. Others were spontaneous mass actions, like the 150 riots in the summer of 1968 in response to structural racism against Black communities. And in some cases, spontaneous eruptions led to sustained, organized activist campaigns.
An example of this was after Martin Luther King Jr went to Memphis and was assassinated. Dianne said that 130 riots began in response. She said, “Some historians have written that Black urban rebellions were too short lived to transform discontent into policy changes. I disagree. I participated in racial justice struggles after 1968 that continued to form US politics and life.”
There were myriad attempts to add organization to the power of the peoples’ uprisings of 1968. Some were superstructural changes to law and government policy that, following the Koerner Commission, sought to correct against overtly racist social exclusion and oppression in order to stabilize the system of capitalist governance as a whole, particularly against the danger of riots.
Others were initiatives from below, including communists involved in factory struggles. In 1967, there were wildcat strikes in factories in Detroit. Dianne said, “Whites and Blacks participated in these strikes, but only Black workers were punished. Black workers noticed this, and formed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), in the wake of these actions.”
The theory of DRUM, and its parent organization, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (which we read about in Detroit I Do Mind Dying and in the film they produced, Finally Got the News) was that Black workers are the vanguard at the point of production. They took on the bosses, the union, the state, and white workers all at once. They wouldn’t even give a leaflet to an interested white worker, though white communists were also getting organized in the factories in similar ways, around the same time.
These movements were also attuned to changes in the international situation, defined by solidarity efforts with anti-colonial and post colonial governments.
Hubris and disappointment
But feelings can also spurn the cause they once spurred. Following the thread of historical development in Dianne’s presentation and the readings for this week, what emerges is a story of pride before the fall. In the case of the SWP, as well as in other movement and revolutionary organizations, an organizational hubris replaced clear eyed assessments of a group’s relevance and representation. What followed was an exaggerated sense of self-importance along with an overblown and baseless assessment of the likelihood of a coming revolution; a flight that faltered and fell to the earth.
Sectarian hubris took different forms according to the politics of the group, but most revolutionary groups that were involved in the 60s movements later experienced a common downturn. In an interview on the “Mother Country Radicals” podcast, Bernadine Dohrn regrets her comment, at a conference of the Revolutionary Youth Movement, during its split from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the formation of the Weather Underground, that the Manson cult’s murder of Sharon Tate was cool. This attitude represented the former SDS leader’s turn away from mass politics and her investment in a sub-culture that was more and more disconnected from the attitudes and politics of workers in the US (or anywhere else).
Less grotesque but no less cartoonish was the transformation underway in the Socialist Workers’ Party. Dianne discusses the sectarian turn in her article reflecting on her experience in the women’s movement, in which she represented the SWP. In the National Organization of Women (NOW), Dianne said that, unlike in the anti-war movement, the SWP dispatched women members to participate “inorganically,” who weren’t familiar with the group and weren’t known by its members, and who “hogged the mic” making canned speeches. She said, the highly controlled and controlling directives that women carried in from the SWP leadership meant, “We were training newer SWP members to be arrogant know-it-alls who didn’t have to listen because the party was where they discussed everything worthwhile and where the SWP was the source of the truth.” This meant SWP members could not be useful to NOW campaigns and political development, and that it turned off other NOW members because “It made us seem like a political sect the way the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a religious sect,” Dianne wrote.
Like with Dohrn and the Weather Underground, the change in the SWP came out of a growing impatience with the center of gravity in the movement as it actually existed. In place the movement, and its inadequate and unrevolutionary politics, each group seeked to substitute itself. For Weather, it meant rejecting the working class and centring a self-selected group of activists who joined them. The SWP rejected the student movement and the class fractions of mostly white collar and service workers that made up the majority of its own membership that had been recruited out of that movement. Both groups, along with those in the Maoist New Communist Movement described by Max Elbaum, undertook purification rituals internally as they concocted novel analyses to explain their turn inwards and away from the really existing world of class struggle.
The SWP exaggerated the revolutionary potential of the moment. Dianne recalled an article from the early 1970s by SWP leader George Breitman, who said that while the US was not currently in a revolutionary situation, there was a “favourable situation for socialists who want to win people over to socialist politics.” He later elaborated that “a radicalization is more possible now than at any other point in US history.”
In his 1983 document “Against Sectarianism: The Evolution of the Socialist Workers Party, 1978-1983,” Peter Camejo tracks the theoretical and political gymnastics performs by SWP’s leaders to justify its sectarian turn. In 1978, Party leader Jack Barnes wrote “we know that by 1974-75, we had entered a period of crises for capitalism — one we will not come out of without gigantic battles for power.” This prediction directed the organization’s turn away from the movement that actually existed in the US and towards an imagined new political protagonist. The ’60s generation, Barnes explained, was “petty bourgeois” and “Marielito,” fleeing the coming proletarian revolution like the gusanos who fled Cuba with the escalation of the Central American revolution. He predicted that the leadership of the coming movement would be drawn exclusively from the industrial working class –– a prediction for which he found no evidence, and which would not be born out.
Instead, as Dianne explained in her presentation, this prophesized revolutionary movement did not happen. “In 1973-74 there was a recession. Ford shut 22 of its 66 US plants. And more than half of the 175,000 UAW members lost their jobs and, in many cases, never went back,” she said. “Capital was able to restucture. In 1970 when GM workers went out, there were 170,000 GM workers. Now there are less than 50,000.”
Conclusion
Dianne concluded with the argument that it was more this restructuring of capitalist production that led to the downturn in the left than anything that the radicals thought or did. But, she said, “The job of the generation of 60s radicals who are left is to help the new generations figure out how to move from being a minority to a majority.”
Maybe the most foregrounded lesson we discussed from the 60s generation was about the importance of revolutionaries grounding themselves in the real, existing dynamics of the historical movements we find ourselves in. I think this recalls some fundamental principles of Leninism, being pretty much a contemporary restatement of what distinguished Lenin during the heady days of summer 1917. He was guided by a demystified, concrete analysis of the contradictory character of the conjuncture. The moments when the revolutionary left could act effectively as relevant participants in struggle during the long ’60s in the US was when they also hewed close to that principle –– producing a critical unity between revolutionary organization and mass movement.
What we see additionally, thanks to the relative nearness of the ’60s to now and the presence of veterans of the 60s in our ranks, is the texture of individual and collective feeling that aided or interrupted the analysis that allowed for or perverted that unity.
During our last two classes in this series we’ll be discussing our present movements and the state of the revolutionary left today. The next class, on “Social movements and organization,” is being held this Thursday February 12th. It will be introduced with a discussion between 60’s veteran Malik Miah and Rob Connell, from a younger generation of the Black freedom struggle. You can find the readings and registration link here: https://solidarity-us.org/socialist_organization_class_2025/
I hope to see you there!