"We should not look back to the New Left"

On September 26, 2019, Matt Cavagrotti and Spencer A. Leonard of the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted an interview via email with Dan La Botz, a longtime labor union activist and the author of A Troublemaker’s Handbook: How to Fight Back Where You Work — And Win! *(1991), *Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (1991), and What Went Wrong? the Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis (2016). What follows is a transcript of their exchange.

Spencer A. Leonard: Studying literature in graduate school at the University of California at San Diego you were “a teaching assistant to Fred Jameson, a student in classes of Herbert Marcuse, and a classmate at times of Angela Davis.”¹ This was from 1969-71, as I understand it. How central was Marxism per se (as opposed to radicalism, anti-imperialism, the movement, etc.) to your concerns as a young graduate student? Had you already joined the Independent Socialist Clubs by then?

Dan La Botz: I and my classmates had all become interested in Marxism as a result of the social movements at the time — civil rights, black power, anti-war, the United Farm Workers union, the women’s movement — and because of our graduate courses in cultural theories. In our courses we read Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others, some of whom, like Sartre, argued that Marxism was the only philosophy of our era.

Some of my fellow students were more sympathetic toward Soviet Communism, some were Maoists, and there were a couple of Trotskyists on campus. I and a few others joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Then I went away for an academic year (1969-1970) to teach in the English Literature Department at Humboldt State College in Eureka, California. There my friend Walt Sheasby helped us form a local socialist collective, and then several of us joined the newly formed International Socialists (IS).

SL: What initially attracted you to the Independent Socialist, third camp position? Why that instead of some other brand of Trotskyism? How aware were you of the divisions within American Trotskyism at the time? How did the IS relate to the main divisions within SDS in the late 1960s, between the Worker-Student Alliance and the Revolutionary Youth Movement?

DLB: While in Eureka, I was initially attracted to the International Socialists after reading two pamphlets, Hal Draper’s Two Souls of Socialism and Stan Weir’s *New Era of Labor Revolt. *Draper presented the “third camp” view that capitalism and Communism (bureaucratic collectivism) were both enemies of socialism. That was expressed in the IS slogan, “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism.” With the U.S. at war in Vietnam, the Soviet Union invading Czechoslovakia, and students and workers in France rising up against the government, that slogan seemed to sum up the world situation in 1968.

When I returned to San Diego, I was disappointed to find that my SDS chapter friends had joined the Progressive Labor Party (PL) and, having become Stalinist-Maoists (PL politics at the time), were leaving college to go into the working class. I knew next to nothing about the Revolutionary Youth Movement wing of SDS, except for the Weathermen, who had become famous for their violence. I and my wife meanwhile joined a study group of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the orthodox Trotskyist group of the era, and read some classic Trotskyist texts, though we were not attracted to the group. We already strongly identified with the politics of Draper and the IS. A couple of friends of mine at that time joined the Spartacist League, a split from the SWP, which, with its very sectarian style of attacking everyone else’s politics, was not attractive to us at all.

Matt Cavagrotti: In 1971, you moved from the West Coast to Chicago to industrialize yourself as part of a wider IS strategy to build rank-and-file groups within the unions. How difficult was it for you to abandon a more intellectual life course?

DLB: When I joined the IS, the group was discussing the necessity of taking socialist ideas back into the working class from which such ideas had been largely excluded. I decided to go to Chicago because I had lived there as a child and my father and his family were there. I thought that would offer some social support, though, in fact, it was not very significant. We had about twenty people in the Chicago IS, a few my age (about 25 years old) and several a little younger, who had been around SDS at the University of Chicago (about 22). I was committed to finding an industrial job in one of our priority industries — auto, steel, telephone, and trucking — but it took me a while. I worked first as a librarian, then as a social worker, and then, briefly, as a steelworker (but in Gary, Indiana, which was too far from my wife’s work) before finally getting a trucking job in Chicago.

Going into industry meant a change in our intellectual focus from whatever we had studied in college or graduate school to a study of the union movement. We read many books on the American labor movement (Sid Lens’s book Left, Right, and Center² was our Bible) as well as books on particular industries. In Chicago, one of our members, Ken B., created a reading list of books on American politics, race, and other issues. We also held discussions of events such as the May 1968 strikes in France and the “Hot Autumn” in Italy in 1969.

IS members tended to be people who read widely, though holding industrial jobs and being involved in both the IS and the union meant that we had less time for other intellectual or cultural pursuits. On the other hand, some of our organization’s leading figures such as the longtime political activist Hal Draper, the historian Robert Brenner, and the leader of our labor work, Kim Moody, produced important internal papers, articles, and books that many of us read. We were at that time associated with the British group International Socialism (later the British Socialist Workers Party) led by Tony Cliff, so we also read all their excellent publications on subjects such as Eastern Europe.

MC: Was the rank-and-file strategy for building socialism a strategy specific to the late 1960s and 1970s? Or do you believe it is still the strategy to be pursued?

DLB: The rank-and-file strategy of the 1960s and 1970s remains important today because the labor bureaucracy continues to be a social caste that plays the role of restraining workers’ struggles for justice. The labor bureaucrats, a social caste with material privileges and with its own worldview (the notion that it knows what is best for the workers), have not changed. The labor bureaucracy for the last fifty years has, in general, been allied with the employers, the Democratic Party, and the U.S. government. While the American economy has changed, there are still millions of industrial workers, service workers, and public employees who are union members, and one can establish rank-and-file groups among them. Today the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is attempting to do so. Some leaders of that project are former IS and Solidarity members.

MC: Many on the American Left, including prominent members of the DSA, have viewed the Communist Party’s involvement in the industrial struggles of the 1930s and 40s as a high-water mark in U.S. working-class history.  How did you and the IS see your activity in the 1970s in relation to that earlier history? Do you think the lessons that your tendency drew from the critique of the Communist Party in this period are in danger of being forgotten today?

DLB: We in the International Socialists certainly understood that the 1930s represented a critical period in American labor history and that Communist organizers had played an important role in that era, but we were never admirers of the Communist Party’s politics, neither during the ultra-left and sectarian “Third Period” nor during the Popular Front. We looked back to the Communists of the era of the Trade Union Education League (TUEL) of the 1920s, as discussed in Kim Moody’s various documents on the rank-and-file strategy.³ We also looked to the model of the Trotskyists involved in the Minneapolis Teamsters union as described by Farrell Dobbs in Teamster Rebellion and his other book about the Teamster experience.

We knew quite well that the leading labor officials, such as John L. Lewis and, later, Phil Murphy, the Socialist Party, and the Communists had worked together to take leadership of the various industrial unions away from the rank and file. Lewis proved to be the dominant figure and the ultimate beneficiary. When criticized for hiring Communists, he replied rhetorically, “Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?” Clinton S. Golden and Harold J. Ruttenberg in their book The Dynamics of Industrial Democracy had without embarrassment discussed the Socialists’ role in suppressing the ranks in the United Steelworkers union. Those who had been good union organizers, they suggested, didn’t always make good union leaders and negotiators, that is, partners with capital. Once Stalin had decided on the Popular Front — that is, an alliance of the Communists not only with other labor parties but also with capitalist parties — the Communist Party played a similar role.

I do think that it is problematic that some writers for Jacobin and some in DSA have not been sufficiently critical of the Communist Party, especially in the Popular Front period. Some of them do not understand Stalin’s and the Soviet Union’s control over the Communist parties, nor do they see the way in which the Popular Front subordinated the labor movement to the labor bureaucracy and later to the Democratic Party. On the other hand, all of the history is still there, to be read, studied, and debated, and everyday experience in the labor movement constantly reminds us of the nefarious role played by labor bureaucrats and contemporary leftists who have similar accommodationist politics, leading the unions and the workers to support Democrats and sometimes Republicans. The point is for those of us who are activists to enter the organizations, the movements, and the fray, and to make the arguments for workers’ power.

SL: You note that, “Hal Draper, the longtime socialist activist who had been the intellectual leader at the center of the IS during its first couple of years, came to disagree with the IS’s self-conception and organizational strategy… [thinking the IS] was on its way to becoming what he called a ‘micro-sect.’” You then add, “Draper’s resignation — the loss of our senior intellectual — was a serious blow to our young group… [though] Draper’s position attracted few followers among our young members.” Do you think that — whether Draper’s course was the right way to go about it or not — more might have been done over the past half century to develop and maintain Marxism as a vital intellectual tradition? About Draper specifically, how do you view his decision to drop out of organized politics? Do you view it in the same way now as you did at the time?

DLB: Hal Draper had been our leading intellectual and political figure; he had founded and inspired the International Socialists. Later, however, he came to believe that the IS, which had adopted what it considered to be a more Leninist conception of organization, was on the wrong track. He did not make a political fight but simply published his paper on the “Microsect” and left the group to become an independent Marxist scholar. Stan Weir, who remained our senior labor activist, made a tour of the IS branches throughout the country to urge us not to become demoralized by Draper’s resignation. Draper’s resignation did not really affect the organization, the size of its membership, or our political course. We could have used Draper’s political guidance, but he went on to write a series of important and useful books on Marx as well as produce translations of his beloved Heine.

So, our problem — that is, the IS’s problem — was that of the revolutionary Left in the United States at that time. The Left had become fragmented, divided into many rival Maoist, Trotskyist, and New Left organizations and currents that tended to be extremely hostile to each other. Like others, we produced a newspaper Workers Power and some of us wrote for the independent socialist journal New Politics. We organized public forums and discussed issues, but none of these made it possible to rise above the dominant Left organizations that were predominantly Maoist. Nor could we compete in the sphere of publications and public forums with the Socialist Workers Party.

Our view then was that our distinctive work in the labor unions, based on the “rank-and-file strategy” as defined by Kim Moody, would bring us success. On the basis of that success, we would gain influence not only in the labor movement, but also in the Left. When the revolutionary Left that had been created in the late 1960s collapsed in 1980, our organization continued to play a significant role in the unions, and we were active in some social movements, though we remained largely an isolated political group.

MC: You mention how in the 1970s, apart from union issues, “[The IS] turned away from most other topics, with the exception of work on African American criminal justice.” You were catching perhaps the last great wave of American militancy. Looking back at it, what sort of opportunity was this for you as socialists? What more might have been made of it?

DLB: The IS turn to industry tended to cut us off from much of the political movement and debate of the era. On the other hand, almost all the social movements died in 1975 for different reasons. The Vietnam War ended at that time. The Civil Rights Movement’s 1964 and 1965 legislative victories had been carried out throughout the South — an important victory. And there was the economic crisis of 1974–75, when, for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployment reached ten percent. That recession, and then the second recession in 1979–81, led to a profound downturn in labor strikes. So, while we may have missed some possibilities, the social and labor movements were dissipating. Certainly, from 1975 on, there was not much to relate to.

SL: Looking back over the politics of yourself and your father, whom you describe as also having been a third camp socialist, how do you draw up a balance sheet? Taking the collapse of the ISO as the end point, or the end of a postscript, what sort of lessons are there to learn from this now largely moribund tradition on the Left? Was the Stalinization of American socialism ever overcome?

DLB: What was called “Third Camp Socialism” from the late 1930s to the fall of the Soviet Union, we later referred to as “socialism from below.” The concept was the same, that is, the notion that socialism cannot and will not be handed down from on high by either Social Democrats or the remaining Stalinist states (North Korea and Cuba) and parties, nor by various authoritarian governments or dictators, but will only come about as the result of the struggle from below by working people, the oppressed, and their allies. For me, this is the fundamental idea of socialism.

I don’t see the tradition of the struggle for democracy and socialism as “moribund,” since I think it lives among the Syrian revolutionaries now in exile, in the Left of the Hong Kong movement for democracy, and among the Yellow Vests in France. Often initially inchoate, socialism from below struggles to emerge, but it represents the only way to democratic socialism.

Social Democracy and Stalinism both had an impact on the American far Left, though the latter was a more serious problem. Yet, in the United States, the great movements for social change of my generation were not controlled, and often not even much influenced, by the Communists. The Anti-Vietnam War Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women’s Movement all arose autonomously, and the Communists were never dominant, even in the anti-war movement. The American religious pacifist tradition played an important role, for example, in both of the first two movements mentioned. The task continues to be to advocate independent social views (that is independent of capitalism and Communism) to the movements and to the new socialist Left in America today, mostly in the Democratic Socialists of America.

MC: You have said that, “When its perspective collapsed, the IS splintered into three groups which became the IS, Workers Power, and the International Socialist Organization (ISO). The split was partly manufactured by Tony Cliff and the British Socialist Workers Party.”⁴ What do you mean by the collapse of the IS’s perspective? And how was the split manufactured by the British SWP?

DLB: There were a number of different issues involved in the IS splits of 1978, some dealing with labor union strategies, some with international questions, and some with the relationship to the British SWP.

When I was a member of the IS, as I have discussed, we proposed a strategy of taking jobs in selected unionized workplaces. Our experience in auto, steel, telephone, and trucking was extremely varied, and we had different degrees of success in building the kind of rank-and-file movement we had envisaged. Where we had some success, we often found ourselves running for union office. Sometimes we did so with real support among the ranks, at other times we ran for office to build greater support among the ranks. That question, of running for union office, became the center of debate in our organization. Our comrades who later went into Workers Power and those who went into the ISO believed that running for office in the unions when there was no rank-and-file upheaval would lead inevitably to becoming part of the union bureaucracy and becoming more conservative. Those who went into the ISO went even further, arguing that any participation in the unions would be conservatizing in the opening of a new period that they referred to as “the downturn.” So, when the ISO emerged from the IS split, they left working-class work for the college campuses where they could recruit. Those who remained in the IS defended the tactic of running for union office under diverse conditions, while appreciating the problem of the union bureaucracy as a conservatizing force.

There was also the question of the Portuguese Revolution of April 1974. We in the IS had supported the Revolutionary Workers Party-Revolutionary Brigades (PRP-BR) led by Maria Isabel Augusta Cortes do Carmo and the revolutionary military officers led by Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho. Both the British SWP and the IS supported the PRP-BR at the beginning. But when the British SWP withdrew its support because the PRP-BR failed to create a national newspaper, we in the IS continued to support them. We sent several of our leading members to Portugal and hosted some of the military officers to speak in the United States. The future leaders of the ISO (then still in the IS) supported the British position. So, this was another point of conflict.

The principal issue is that the British Socialist Workers Party led by Tony Cliff then provoked a split in the organization over both the issues of the Portuguese Revolution and over the labor union issues. The three groups that emerged from the split — IS, Workers Power, and the ISO — each had about 100 members. 

The group that became Workers Power and published Against the Current remained politically much closer to those of us in the IS, and that made it possible for us later to reunite in Solidarity in 1986, together with some refugees from the U.S. Socialist Workers Party led by Jack Barnes. Barnes, who had come to reject Trotskyism, turned his organization into a megaphone for Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communist Party, while at the same time expelling piecemeal many longtime U.S. SWP leaders and members. Once outside the SWP, the expelled members found each other, formed several small groups, and then one of those groups joined with the IS and Workers Power to create Solidarity in 1986. 

SL: How does Solidarity orient towards politics today? How much political and intellectual continuity is there between Solidarity today and the politics of Trotsky, Shachtman, Draper, and/or Stan Weir?

DLB: From its founding in 1986 until its last convention this past summer in Chicago, Solidarity saw itself as engaged in a holding action, working to regroup with others on the Left to create a socialist group that could hold on until the next social upsurge. Solidarity was from the beginning a multi-tendency organization and did not adopt a “democratic centralist” form of organization. Solidarity continued to work to build rank-and-file groups in the unions, to work with the social movements, and to support independent politics outside of and to the left of the Democratic Party, usually working with the Green Party. Despite many efforts, regroupment with other leftists has proved impossible over the 35 years of the group’s existence, and there was no significant turn toward independent political action by American voters.

The major different tendencies within Solidarity, what we might call the Shachtman-Draper and the Trotskyist tendencies, continued to exist alongside other members who had their own points of view. With the sudden upsurge of the DSA during the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016, many Solidarity members joined. The DSA provided Solidarity members with a milieu in which to organize with thousands of young people, while Solidarity atrophied. At our last convention, we recognized that Solidarity could not continue as a left group and we voted to transform Solidarity into an educational center over the next two years.

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MC: What was Solidarity’s rationale in making this decision? Aren’t the legacies of the Shachtman-Draper and Trotskyist tendencies that you mention at risk of being lost with the passing of your generation? Do you see this potential (further) breakdown of continuity with the past as an emancipation or a danger?

DLB: Solidarity did not so much make a decision as acquiesce to the reality of the appearance and growth of a new mass social movement in the form of DSA and the new New Left. Since Solidarity’s members are activists and radicals committed to strategies that involve work within the movement and are not simply cynical social critics, our members — myself among the first — began to move into the DSA, because that was where the action was. I have no fear that the Third Camp ideas — anti-capitalist and anti-Communist (that is, anti-Stalinist) — will continue to exist and develop, because they conform to reality and are validated practically every day. They have an influence today among many young people and new activists. I do not see the Left in danger from a break in continuity, and I think the future will provide new opportunities for developing our political concepts and strategies.

MC: When you first encountered it, the organized working class in this country was far more independent of the Democratic Party than it is today. How specifically has this come to be? Do you see the formation of a socialist party in the United States as a goal to be aimed at? If not, why not? If so, what to your mind is the best way forward?

DLB: I disagree with the premise that the working class was far more independent of the Democratic Party than they are today. While the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s tended to move to the Left of the Democrats, we never produced a viable political alternative, despite experiments from the Peace and Freedom Party to La Raza Unida and the Puerto Rican Independence Party. And today there is a tremendous sense of alienation from the entire political system, both Republicans and Democrats, as manifest in the success of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, both of whom ran as outsiders.

I believe that the American working class will have to create its own political party if we are to move forward to socialism. At present, there is a debate in the pages of Jacobin and among DSA members about the relationship of socialists to the Democratic Party and how a socialist party might come about. This is a very important development, to have tens of thousands of young socialists trying to figure out how to escape from the trap of the political party system and of the Democratic Party. 

MC: Do you think the labor strategies you attempted in the 1970s remain valid today?

DLB: I think that the rank-and-file strategy — that is organizing workers to turn their unions into fighting organizations to confront the employers and the government, which usually entails a fight against the higher levels of the union bureaucracy — remains essential. Only through workers’ self-organization will it be possible to build class consciousness, confidence, and combativity. And even that won’t be enough, because we must also organize the unorganized, and we must connect progressive social movements — feminist, environmental, LGBTQ, pro-immigrant, and internationalist — with the workers’ movement. The strategies we pursued must be adapted to today’s economic and political situation, but I believe they remain essential.

MC: What’s your own position on these debates in Jacobin and amongst the DSA regarding the way forward for socialism?

DLB: It is good and useful that Jacobin and Catalyst have promoted discussions of how we get from capitalism to socialism, specifically how we get beyond the two-party electoral system, i.e. escape the Democratic Party and build an independent, working class, socialist party. While I do not agree with most of the positions presented that argue for a peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism, the debate is good and brings out other more radical and revolutionary positions. I think most of *Jacobin’*s authors fail to understand the actual dynamic of revolutionary movements, where peaceful political processes such as elections alternate with riots, strikes, and revolts, such as Rosa Luxemburg described in her pamphlet on The Mass Strike. They also, it seems to me, fail to take into account that as the Left grows, the government will become more repressive, and that non-state actors, such as paramilitaries, will enter the picture on right and Left. I made some of these points in my review of Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara’s book The Socialist Manifesto.⁵  Still, the debate, limited as it has been until now, provokes thinking and discussion.

SL: It doesn’t seem like we are closer to socialism today than we were one hundred years ago. Indeed, we are arguably much farther from it. Do you agree with this? If not, why not? If so, how would you at least begin to account for the failure of socialism in the 20th century? What, if anything, should socialists learn from the twentieth century and, more specifically, from the experience of the New Left?

DLB: We remain today far from the socialist revolution that we desire and that we believe is necessary for humanity. The October Revolution, because of both objective circumstances and some of the errors of the Bolshevik leadership, led to the rise of Stalinism and to the bureaucratic collectivist regimes in the Soviet Union and then in China and elsewhere. At the same time, the ability of the United States to revive European capitalism after the war provided the economic basis for the rise of Social Democracy in Western Europe. The entrenchment of both Stalinism and Social Democracy provided strong barriers to the rise of an independent Left, as did the Democratic Party and the limited social welfare state in the United States.

The New Left of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated the importance of constructing and participating in social movements, but it did not prove capable of building a strong national organization with socialist politics. And out of that New Left, or in and around it, emerged various Maoist and Trotskyist groups, which left an unfortunate legacy of Stalinist or quasi-Stalinist politics and sectarianism. If we are looking for inspirational and useful models today, we should not look back to the New Left, but rather look at the example of the Hong Kong democracy movement and the Yellow Vests in France. We need to revive the fierce militancy, critical outlook, and independence found in those movements today.

SL: But surely there was infinitely more debate and intellectual vitality in the New Left than there is in these movements today. Is the fierce militancy that you speak of really matched by the necessary critical outlook, the necessary historical consciousness?

DLB: I am surprised by the apparent pessimism suggested by some of your questions.

I believe that we are just at the beginning of the current new New Left, but that already there is tremendous political discussion in debate not only in DSA, but also among others on the far Left who might call themselves council communists or libertarian socialists, that is, anarchists. And that is true both in the United States and abroad. In France, the Yellow Vests have raised important political questions and debates. In Latin America, the rolling out of the Pink Tide and the rise of the far right has engendered new debates. In China, the Communist government’s attempts to sinicize Tibet through colonization, its suppression of the Uyghurs, and especially the Hong Kong rebellion have also encouraged new arguments about theory and practice. Likewise, with the crisis of neoliberalism and the rise of the populist, authoritarian right and the looming threat of environmental catastrophe due to climate change. Everywhere, it is real changes in the world situation that drive people to attempt to understand and, in doing so, they go back to socialist analyses of other moments.

The actual threats, such as climate change, force people to develop theories and strategies to respond. I think that everywhere we see people trying to figure things out, many of whom have very critical outlooks and among them are those who bring a consciousness of history and know the history of class consciousness.

SL: What would you have said in, say, 1968 or 1978 if someone had told you that forty or fifty years on, Michael Harrington’s politics would claim the most adherents from young people in America? Given that Harrington, too, came out of the Shachtmanite tradition, albeit that wing of it that was to the right of the Independent Socialist Clubs in the 1960s, what are the ironies here? How, in short, does the popularity and character of the contemporary DSA reveal and obscure the history you have lived through?

DLB: I am thrilled and delighted by the rise in America today of a mass organization with 50,000 members who call themselves socialists and that that is part of a broader cohort of millions of young people that polls indicate prefer socialism to capitalism. The DSA today does not have Michael Harrington’s politics. It does not at present have a base in, and orientation toward, the labor bureaucracy, nor does not subordinate itself to the Democratic Party, even when it runs Democratic candidates, and it does not support Israel.

A series of interesting developments have made possible the growth of DSA and, beyond it, a New Left. First, of course, Occupy Wall Street, then Black Lives Matter, and today there are many protests nationally against Trump’s racist and vicious immigration policies. Second, Bernie Sanders’s idiosyncratic independence and integrity, which, while not even social democratic in the classic sense (he’s actually closer to New Deal liberalism), nevertheless legitimated a discussion about socialism, offered the most progressive Democratic Party program in forty years or more, and inspired thousands of young people to become more critical of the system and more active. Third, the election of Donald Trump and his transformation from simply a reactionary businessman into a genuine right-wing authoritarian leader, has also greatly contributed to the making of today’s Newest Left.

Those of us who value the socialism of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, that is socialism from below, should make it our goal to see that this Newest Left, through its experience, develops a perspective of workers’ power and independent political action.| P