Response to: “The 90 percent ‘no’ vote at Deere and the growing rebellion against the corporatist unions” by Jerry White.

Trotsky wrote in The Third International After Lenin:

The mistakes of pseudo-“leftism” which hampered the development of the communist parties, later gave an impetus to new empirical zigzags: namely, to an accelerated sliding down to the Right. A cat burned by hot milk shies away from cold water. The “Left” Central Committees of a number of parties were deposed as violently as they had been constituted prior to the Fifth Congress. The adventurist Leftism gave way to an open opportunism of the Right-Centrist type. To comprehend the character and the tempo of this organizational Rightward swing, it must be recalled that Stalin, the director of this turn, back in September 1924 appraised the passing of party leadership to Maslow, Ruth Fischer, Treint, Suzanne Girault, and others, as the expression of the Bolshevization of the parties and an answer to the demands of the Bolshevik workers who are marching toward the revolution and “want revolutionary leaders.

Stalin wrote, “The last half year is remarkable in the sense that it presents a radical turning point in the life of the communist parties of the West, in the sense that the social democratic survivals were decisively liquidated, the party cadres Bolshevized, and the opportunist elements isolated.” [30]

But ten months later the genuine “Bolsheviks” and “revolutionary leaders” were declared social democrats and renegades, ousted from leadership and driven out of the party.

Despite the panicky character of this change of leaders, frequently effected by resorting to rude and disloyal mechanical measures of the apparatus, it is impossible to draw any rigorous ideological line of demarcation between the phase of ultra-left policy and the period of opportunistic down-sliding that followed it.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/10/12/pers-o12.html

We need to call attention to the last paragraph in the above quote as it relates to the situation dividing union membership from the unions’ bureaucratic leadership, as expressed by the large, near unanimous rejection of the bureaucracy and its anti-worker proposals. Clearly the workers need a counter-proposal followed by strike actions to give negotiating power to their proposals. Where do these proposals come from? The workers themselves, as individuals? This solution of the nano-bureaucracy seeks to “isolate the opportunist elements”, as Stalin called it, in order to impose a settlement favorable to the bureaucracy and its special relationship with the employers.

The “ultra-left policy”, as Trotsky referred to it, offers a new committee, of a “panicky character”, depending on “rude and disloyal mechanical measures of the apparatus”, namely the forced ejection of Democratic Power from the education committee. Such a furious zig-zagging will not eliminate the “opportunistic down-sliding” of the committees towards such groups as the DSA, who earned praise from David North for Norman Thomas, (and unhealthy supplication for DSA National Director Maria Svart) the Presbyterian Minister turned socialist politician who sought to suppress Trotskyist literature and organization in the US while overseeing the 1930s decline of the SPA built by Eugene Debs. If Democratic Power cannot participate in such committees, then who can? Surely a new type of Holy Minister on a mission to save socialism from its revolutionary working class roots. Under their influence and then leadership, socialism must appear as a theory we analyze in order to strengthen the bourgeois republic.

This “slide to the right” requires a re-alignment based on the defense of the democratic rights of the membership of the party, in line with the defense of the working class as a whole. The determination of the nano-bureaucracy to suppress its own membership directly aids the union bureaucracy and furthermore the state bureaucracy in suppressing the political positions most closely associated with the economic interests of the working class. The enslaving of the working class depends on the denial to the working class of their rights to place their economic demands on the political agenda.

Jerry White accurately describes the union apparatus:

“These organizations, which function as a labor police force for management and are run by union executives with incomes in the top 5 percent of income earners, if not higher, are completely disconnected from and hostile to the needs and aspirations of the workers they falsely claim to ‘represent.’ Under conditions of explosive social anger, their primary concern is to prove their usefulness to management and the state by ramming through pro-company agreements one way or another.”

In the above paragraph, the writer reveals the correct attitude towards supposed workers’ leaders with high net worth and high incomes. The same attitude must exist within the party in the form of a financial report on, among other things, the income and net worth of party leadership, distributed to all financial contributors. Without such an annual document, it clearly emerges who the nano-bureaucracy really sides with, those few votes garnered by the labor executives in favor of class compromise and, in effect, class submission for the working class. We see this most clearly in the decision to exclude Democratic Power but also in the decision to suppress science in defense of state agents using secret, hi-tech weapons.

Such a policy will “prove their usefulness” to the state and the reaction, “by ramming through pro-company agreements one way or another,” i.e. through the use of the secret weapons they are actively concealing. What does Jerry White mean by “one way or another?” Is this a conspiracy theory? If he is not careful, he may be next on Andre Damon’s “conspiracy theorist” hit list. After all, the renegade has no problem slandering and provoking even US intelligence agency officials as “conspiracy theorists” and using unconventional organizational measures to misrepresent and suppress their arguments.

Jerry White then turns on the pseudo-left:

“The defenders of the authority of the unions among the pseudo-left, themselves aligned with the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, refer to the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site as “sectarian” because of our call for the formation of rank-and-file committees. Their principal concern, however, is that the campaign led by the WSWS for the development of independent organizations of working-class struggle is winning a mass response.

“At Deere, WSWS articles have been read by thousands of workers, who have distributed them at the plants and shared them on social media. Like the Dana workers and Volvo Trucks workers before them, the WSWS has been central in encouraging and assisting Deere workers in developing their own independent initiative through the formation of a rank-and-file committee.”

The experiences of Democratic Power, working on SEP campaigns and leading SEP-aligned organizations, have disproven the slander of the nano-bureaucracy and brought it to shame for its openly permissive verbal abuse harassment policy. This Stalinist turn against the pseudo-left, as Trotsky described it, mean in fact an opportunist turn to the right. A policy “violently… consitituted” of ultra-left criminality does not strengthen socialist leadership but turns it towards “adventurism,” criticized by Lenin and Trotsky as a precursor of opportunism. In attempting to create a short-cut in the long struggle against opportunism, the SEP nano-bureaucracy has pursued a “violent”, “rude and disloyal” Stalinist policy of “isolating” opportunists through criminal acts of aggression. This leaves out the entire theoretical struggle over political program and perspective and attempts to impose a “correct” line by brute force or disguised brute force. Trotsky defended the workers won over from reformist Social Democracy towards the revolutionary perspective and sought to deepen their theoretical appreciation of the differences in perspective and organization. Lenin welcomed the Mensheviks’ separate organizations and separate newspapers because he preferred an organized opposition with which to debate over a disorganized minority easily won to anarchism and terrorism.

In order to hold on to the “mass response” won by the campaigns for rank and file committees, the SEP membership must confront its own bureaucracy in the same way that the unionized workers have confronted their union bureaucrats. Therefore, Democratic Power calls on the SEP to allow a “No” vote against its own leadership and the opening up of a Democratic Power faction as an officially recognized faction within the SEP to defend the rights of official members and new recruits against bureaucratic abuses of power. The first line of security for the membership of the revolutionary party is to observe and report on such abuses and bring them to the largest audience possible.