Although these essay were written for a specific polemical purpose in 1970, their subject—how to organize a mass revolutionary party of socialist opposition to modern capitalism—is one of immediate and pressing concern to any serious socialist. And, as evidence of this, the first essay has already gained a fairly wide distribution without any serious attempt to publicize it.
Nevertheless, the origins of these essays makes some references unclear. In particular, the reader cannot help wondering who the “we” are who are referred to throughout these essays. This small note is mainly designed to answer this nagging question.
The political career of the author, Hal Draper, has been sketched elsewhere. In part the “we” refers to his comrades of the Workers Party especially when the reference is to union activity during the period of the Second World War. But the political tendency referred to found new recruits in the left wing of the Socialist Party, the civil rights movement, and the antiwar movement of the 1950s and 60s. Since these new recruits considered themselves to be joining an ongoing “third camp” political tradition references to this period also use “we.”
Like all polemical essays, this one is easier to understood if the immediate background is filled in. With the self-destruction of the student antiwar movement in 1968-69, thousands of people were looking for a new direction. Among the various fractions and splinters of the New Left the verbal commitment to the “working class” as an abstract concept was replaced by a move to “go to the workers” themselves.
But this was a movement of students overwhelmingly of middle class background whose knowledge of the American working class and its institutions, in so far as it existed at all, was based on what their bourgeois professors told them. Since what they had been told was that the trade unions were dominated by narrow-minded and corrupt bureaucrats with no social concerns, these students entered the world of work with the quite explicit notion that the immediate enemy was not the employers but the unions. The student activists who made up the majority of the membership of the various “third camp” political groups were no exception in this regard.
This was an extreme case of a sickness that has plagued the socialist movement from its beginnings. The following essays were directed at this immediate audience. Unfortunately, the attitudes and politics of this audience are still quite widespread even if they are expressed in less extreme form. And the organizational practices that follow from these politics continue to plague the movement. Which is why this attempt to point to a different road for the socialist movement is important.
It should be mentioned that these essays have not been edited. Some claims and allegations are made that would have to be modified if not completely rejected in light of subsequent historical research. I am thinking of the claim that there was no legal trade union movement in Russia prior to 1917. Two works in particular—Jeremiah Schneiderman’s Sergei Zubatov and Revolutionary Marxism (Cornell University Press, 1976) and Geoffrey Swain’s Russian Social Democracy and the Legal Labour Movment, 1906–14, (The MacMillan Press, 1983)—tell the story of the legal trade unions in Czarist Russia and Lenin’s role in them. In addition, the reader should keep in mind that these were polemics directed at an American audience—that is to say a particularly backward audience politically speaking and not every statement should be automatically applied to movements in countries with a more advanced political culture.
E. Haberkern, 1998