James Creegan, a lifelong revolutionary socialist and a good friend and
comrade, died on Thursday, Nov. 23, 2023, at the age of seventy-six, following a
lengthy illness. I had the good fortune to know Jim and collaborated with him
on educational and political projects over the last ten years. Over time, I
learned something about where he came from and the forces that shaped him. Much
of the material I present is taken from a memoir Jim wrote and circulated among
a few friends. All quotations are taken from his memoir unless otherwise
indicated. This article was first published in the Weekly Worker edition
of Dec. 7, 2023.
Note: An earlier version of this obituary mistakenly listed the League for a Revolutionary Party as participating in the slanderous claim that Jim Creegan was a "scab". This has been corrected.
A.S.
 |
| Jim in Greece, August 2018 |
Formative Years
From the New Left to Trotsky
Jim had his road to Damascus moment in his senior
year when he read Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy at the suggestion of a
fellow member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As he put it years later,
This biography changed my
political views more than any single work I've read, and I began to take more
of an interest in Trotskyism.
His newfound interest in Trotskyism however did not
immediately translate into a political affiliation.
After graduating college in 1969, Jim returned to
his hometown, Philadelphia. He remained there for two years during which he
became active in the local chapter of the New American Movement (NAM). The NAM
was basically a grouping of New Left refugees trying to reconstitute themselves
politically. He entered graduate school in philosophy at the University of
Colorado (Boulder) in 1972. He belonged to the NAM chapter there as well, but
his main emphasis was on study--deepening his understanding of classical philosophy,
Hegel, and Marx.
Jim returned to Philly in 1977, a more educated and
convinced, Marxist than before. He had it in the back of his mind that the next
phase of his life had to include organized politics. He always believed
abstractly that any Marxist worth his/her salt must belong to a party-type
organization. In his own words, Jim wrote about this period of his life,
I felt somewhat guilty
about not having acted upon that belief by following the more serious refugees
from the New Left who joined various parties in the early 70s. But I felt the
need for more knowledge at the time, so went to grad school instead. And I
hadn't burned my bridges to academia even after I left Boulder. I enrolled in
the Political Economy grad program at the New School (which, as it turned out,
was like what people often say about communism: appealing on paper, but
disappointing in practice), and moved to NYC in 1979.
Adventures in the Spartacist League
…it reinforced much of
what I felt about the rest of the left circa 1980: that most
individuals and organizations had moved markedly to the right along with
ruling-class-generated public opinion and emerged in far too flaccid a state to
meet the challenges of the Carter/Reagan years .
Jim’s reaction was understandable. As a revolutionary socialist in
formation, he had a gut reaction against the abandonment of radical politics by
many of his contemporaries from the 1960’s generation. The fact that Jim’s
reaction coincided with his introduction to the Spartacist League is one of
those contingent events in a life that nevertheless expressed a certain logic. The
Spartacist League was vociferous in its denunciation of what they considered
opportunism on the left, more so than any other organization claiming to be
Trotskyist. It very much was in consonance with Jim’s uncompromising convictions as a
Trotskyist. Jim later explained his affinity for this side of the SL:
I am by temperament a
controversialist, who relishes the clash of ideas, the cut and thrust of polemic.
The witty, pugilistic style of WV seemed to me to partake more of the authentic
spirit of communism in its early pre-Stalinist incarnation, much of which my
father had retained from his youth and passed on to me.
Once he became convinced of the correctness of a
political stance Jim would brook no apologies for those misguided individuals
on the wrong side of that issue, and he did not suffer fools. However, after a
while Jim did have second thoughts about the Spartacist style that attracted
him initially. He pointed to their “acerbic style” and their “excessively
abrasive and hectoring "interventions" at the political meetings of
other groups.” The SL’s interventions
often degenerated into what he described as “the accusation and insult that had
become an SL trademark.”
Jim’s initial deep commitment to a political
organization that gave expression to his revolutionary impulses certainly had
its admirable side. But it also harbored a fundamental problem. Once he became
convinced of something it was exceedingly difficult for Jim to pause and
retrace his steps and consider that he may have been mistaken. That was my
judgment based on many discussions I had with Jim. No matter how much his
original enthusiasm for the SL changed into a deep opposition both to their
policies and to their internal regime, he always looked back to the SL of the
1970’s as their golden age.
To cite one example, Jim indicated more than once
that a fundamental issue which cemented his sympathy for the SL was the
full-throated support the Spartacist League provided to the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan in 1979.
Jim and I never agreed on this issue. I found the
SL’s slogan, ‘Hail to the Red Army’ repugnant. It created the pretense that the
Russian tanks that went into Afghanistan in 1979 had a direct connection to the
heroic Red Army of 1919 that defeated the counterrevolutionary forces arrayed
against the newly established Soviet state. The Spartacist League, and Jim, had
this notion that any military intervention by the Soviet Union was an
expression of the Stalinist bureaucracy defending the gains of the October
Revolution. While it was true that the forces arrayed against the Soviet-backed
regime in Kabul were reactionary Islamists backed by the CIA it was also true
that the Soviet-backed regime did not come into existence as a result of a
popular uprising. Rather it was the inheritor of a series of coups backed by
Moscow and had little popular support. The SL by this point in its political
evolution had elevated the Stalinist bureaucracy at the expense of the
international working class. While it was incumbent on Trotskyists to defend
the Soviet Union, despite the bureaucracy, against imperialism, it did not
follow that the Stalinist bureaucracy had somehow become a progressive factor
in world politics and it certainly did not follow that Trotskyists were obliged
to support whatever global political maneuver the Stalinist bureaucracy
involved itself in. Once you substitute a bureaucracy for the revolutionary
potential of the masses, as the SL did, you wind up with some very bizarre –
for a Trotskyist – positions. The most notorious expression of this was the
publication by Workers Vanguard in 1984, of a black-bordered death notice on
its front page marking the death of the former KGB and Soviet party chief Yuri
Andropov.
But even when Jim was an enthusiastic supporter of
the SL’s perspective, he never became an apparatchik who failed to question the
leadership, the kind of person that inhabits every group, one who is content to
follow orders. Exactly the opposite was the case. Jim always had a mind of his
own and refused to become the obsequious follower that other members of SL
became.
Jim’s description of his duties when he was a
member of the Spartacist League testifies to his unselfish spirit, sacrificing
much of his personal life and income as a soldier for the cause of the
revolution. Even years after he had left the SL Jim still thought that those
onerous work assignments were legitimate though he also became angered by the
unequal treatment meted out to different members. Jim was assigned numerous
duties on a daily basis involving newspaper sales, sales of literature and
meetings with fellow SL members, in addition to a regular and much-dreaded
early morning sale where he had to arrive at 7AM at a remote location in
Brooklyn. By way of contrast, the head of the Spartacist League lived like a
king.
Listen to Jim’s depiction of the corruption of the
Spartacist leader, James Robertson, and the regime of exploitation built around
his needs:
Maybe now you can better
appreciate why those of us who joined the BT later on were so enraged
that Robertson, however greatly he had sacrificed to build the SL in the
past, was then having a basement playroom built with our labor for his
nocturnal escapades, flying Concorde--many times more expensive than a regular
passenger jet--having a hot tub installed ( again with organizational funds and
labor) in his NYC apartment, and demanding a special contribution over and
above dues to buy himself a house in the Bay Area.
When Jim joined the SL, he came as part of a wave
of new recruits inspired by their campaign for a victory for the Salvadoran
rebels and opposition to a compromise with leaders of the death squads that had
plagued El Salvador. But from the start the S L never fully trusted him because
he came to them as already formed politically instead of “the preferred tabula
rasa minds, upon which the leadership could effortlessly inscribe its
wisdom and ‘organizational norms’.”
As a result, Jim was given tasks that mostly
segregated him from other comrades lest he “infect” them with his independent
spirit. He wrote,
…because of my reluctance
to join full-throatedly in Robertson's amen chorus, I was shunted off into the
lowly position of lit director… isolated from other members on the second floor
of the SL compound, where I occupied the only permanent work station. The other
members were assigned to the upper floors, only passing on occasion the lit
shelves where I worked.
The SL never recognized the asset they had in Jim
and instead of encouraging his political and theoretical development they kept
him occupied with lots of make-work tasks. In retrospect, the worst crime they
committed was undoubtedly their refusal to allow him to contribute to their publications
given Jim’s enormous talent for political-historical analysis.
The Spartacist Afterlife
In time Jim became disenchanted with the IBT. Years
later he explained that,
They [the
IBT] believed that the program remained valid regardless of what happened in
the world. They had no clue in terms of analyzing newer developments in the
class struggle and in politics. [1]
It troubled Jim that although the IBT had at that
time existed for 20 years it had failed miserably to attract members and was the
same tiny group that it was at its inception. One would think that if your goal
were to change the world and you remained a tiny group over the years that had
absolutely no influence on the working class, you should ask why this failure
and critique whatever practices you have engaged in that led to this sterile
abyss. One would think that, but only if one were ignorant of the ways of the
various grouplets that populate the extreme left. Such questions never occur to
them as they blithely ignore reality.
One incident stands out during Jim’s tenure in the
IBT. He had worked for a number of years as a clerk at the office of the
Village Voice, a famous New York weekly that featured some of the best
journalists in the country. In 1996 the maintenance workers at the building
housing the Village Voice went on strike, part of a city-wide strike, against
the companies that were contracted by the building owners to do their
maintenance. Jim was the shop steward of the United Auto Workers branch that
represented the Village Voice employees. The striking maintenance workers
belonged to a different union and made it clear that their strike was against
the company that employed the maintenance workers, not the Village Voice. The
Voice employees, with the assent of the UAW local and Village Voice management, took out the trash themselves.
The striking building maintenance workers did not object to this accommodation.
The only other option would have been to allow the building’s maintenance
contractor to bring in scabs to do that job. The Village Voice owners also
stopped all payments to the building maintenance contractors for the duration
of the strike. In addition, the Village Voice UAW local, largely because of
Jim’s efforts, raised $3,000 for the striking maintenance workers in an
unprecedented show of solidarity.
The Spartacist League newspaper, Workers Vanguard,
always ready to find something with which to trash their IBT rivals, said Jim
was a “scab” for participating in the Village Voice’s attempt to keep their
operations going. The IBT put out a pamphlet with the title, Sectarians,
“Scabs” & Socialists, which defended Jim against the slanderous “scab”
charge. The union local also put out a bulletin, titled Support to Strikers, So
Long to Scabs, which explained that the actions taken by the Village workers
were in support of the strike by the building’s maintenance workers. Village
Voice management also came to an agreement with the union to stop paying the
building maintenance fee until such time as the building maintenance worker’s
strike was settled.
This was back in 1996. Move forward 20 years to 2016. Jim is suddenly confronted with the news that the IBT, which had defended him in 1996, had now “repudiated” the pamphlet defending him and had concluded that Jim had been a scab after all. The IBT further [falsely] claimed ignorance of the details at the time as their rationale for having defended Jim in 1996! Jim responded to these slanders with a brilliant piece that skewers the IBT and the SL. It is worth quoting the beginning of Jim’s response to give you a flavor of his inimical polemical style:
Old Lie Makes New Converts
The principal service that
the microscopic and pompously named International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) has
performed for the left was to expose the Spartacist League (US) and its
affiliates in the International Communist League (ICL) as the personality cult
that they are. Unable to answer the truthful testimony of the IBT (and its
predecessors, the External Tendency, and the Bolshevik Tendency), the
Spartacists fired back with a cascade of lies about their accusers, worthy of
the vipers’ nest this organization had
become. Now, in a turn more pathetic than pernicious, the IBT has taken to
retailing one of the lies directed against me when I was a member of their
group over twenty years ago. I hesitate to reply only because I fear that I
might make myself look ridiculous by expending so many pixels over something
that won’t matter a tinker’s damn to anyone outside the time capsule inhabited by the Spartacist
League and its derivative groupuscules. But, as Trotsky said, the historical
record should be accurately maintained, even in its minutest details. [2]
Jim was denounced not only by the SL and the IBT,
but also by another Spart spawn, the Internationalist Group (IG). Anyone who
could earn the wrath of all these small-minded sectarian outfits deserves a
medal!
A revolutionary without a party
After leaving the IBT in the mid 1990’s, Jim was finally able to flourish as a writer, an educator, and a trenchant critic of contemporary culture. And as I later learned Jim was also a great raconteur, a poet, and a competent singer. Yet ironically, in this most productive period of his life, Jim was not affiliated with any political group. For someone who always believed that “any Marxist worth his salt should be a member of a party” this was undoubtedly a bittersweet period for him.
As a result of Jim’s work as an activist in the UAW
local and his outspoken politics, he was forced out of his job at the Village
Voice in 2002 after new owners took it over. Jim’s next job was that of a
substitute teacher in the New York City public school system. The job was often
very gratifying as Jim’s talents as a teacher made him an instant favorite in
practically every school to which he was assigned. However as much as Jim
enjoyed teaching, the earnings of a substitute teacher in the New York public
school system are quite meager and the benefits even worse. But the job suited
Jim insofar as he often had the afternoons free to read or write.
It was in this period that Jim’s literary and
polemical talents shined as he became a regular contributor to the UK-based
newspaper Weekly Worker. He wrote dozens of articles for the Weekly Worker
starting in 2007 and ending in June of 2022. Jim’s oeuvre was not confined to
strictly political essays, which he did masterfully enough, but also touched on
history and culture. One notable example was a review of a film by Ken Loach
about the Irish war of independence and subsequent civil war, Ken Loach's use of Irish
history. [3]
When the pandemic hit, Jim was assigned to the
well-known science-oriented high school, Stuyvesant. Jim made a huge impression
on his colleagues and students at Stuyvesant. The students knew him as the
teacher who sang the attendance call. He worked at Stuyvesant up until several weeks
prior to his death.
Afterword
The International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) suffered
a major split in 2018. The issue that precipitated the split was, as you may
have guessed, the Russian question. Following the split the IBT was left with
fewer members than it had when it started out almost 50 years ago. As Jim explained at a Left Forum panel in 2019,
Now the
IBT, which was fewer than twenty members, has the rare distinction among
Trotskyist grouplets that they managed to split over the Russian question
thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union! [4]
I met Jim ten years ago in a seminar on the Russian
Revolution organized by the Brecht Forum. When the Brecht Forum dissolved the
following year both of us continued with its successor organization, the
Marxist Education Project. Although we did not agree on every political and
philosophical question, we had enough affinity on basic issues to collaborate
on a number of projects. Among these was a walking tour in New York inspired by
Trotsky’s 9-week sojourn in that city prior to his arrival in Russia in 1917. We
also worked together, along with Marilyn Vogt-Downey, on a special broadcast on
radio station WBAI commemorating the 100th anniversary of the October
Revolution. Jim was also a participant -
and often a co-facilitator - in a series of classes on Hegel that I taught
through the Marxist Education Project. Among Jim’s many contributions to that
class series one that stands out for me was Jim’s masterful lecture on the
French Revolution. I will miss our back
and forth sparring over our different interpretations of Hegel.
In addition to our political collaboration Jim and I developed a personal bond. Both of us came out of the 60’s generation and both of us joined small Trotskyist groups following a flirtation with the New Left. It turned out that we knew several people in common. I learned that Jim had known my first wife before I met her, when they were both members of SDS at Penn State. It also turned out that the groups we joined, in Jim’s case the Spartacist League, in mine the Workers League, began life in the same opposition faction of the Socialist Workers Party in the early 1960’s. And we both witnessed the toll that the years of Reaganite reaction inflicted on the 60s generation. Many did not survive the trauma when the optimism and Utopian spirit of the 60’s clashed with the dismal, self-centered culture of the 80’s and 90’s. We both knew people whose lives were cut short by mental illness, alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide.
Any account by me of Jim’s political life would not
be complete if I did not mention that Jim and I had a fundamental disagreement
about the very basis of Trotskyism. Jim,
in his later years, had come to the conclusion that the premise behind the
launch of the Fourth International by Trotsky in 1938 was a mistaken assessment of the nature of the
epoch. Trotsky thought that we were living in a period of the decay and
terminal decline of capitalism and that therefore the objective conditions were
ripe for socialist revolution. Jim felt that Trotsky’s assessment of capitalism
in the 20th century was mistaken and cited the post-war boom as evidence of
that. I thought that Jim was being too
literal in his interpretation of Trotsky’s intent. While it was true that
Trotsky did not anticipate the post-war boom (not that anyone else did either)
his pronouncement on the nature of the epoch was not meant to only apply to the
immediate situation capitalism faced in the 1930’s and the decades following but
was a judgment of an entire historical period
whose length could not be predicted in advance. I also felt that while Jim’s
commitment and active participation in the struggles that emerged in the last sixty
years were second to none, he was at the same time overly pessimistic about the
potential for the rebirth of a militant working class. Jim would undoubtedly have retorted that he was
a realist, not a pessimist, and that my optimism was based on illusions I
inherited from the Trotskyist groups with which I had been associated. (Jim provided
a detailed presentation on this topic in a panel at the Left Forum.) [5]
Yet no matter how strong our disagreements I knew that with Jim I was dealing
with an intellectual giant who was not
easily dismissed.
I should also mention
that Jim was a wonderful raconteur who had mastered the art of storytelling. I
always enjoyed going to an Irish pub with him.
Jim’s memory will be cherished by his friends and
colleagues, some of whom have known him
since childhood, others more recently. He leaves a legacy of commitment and
independence tempered by his wit and good humor.
Alex Steiner
New York, Dec 2, 2023
 |
| Jim standing in front of a monument to Lord Byron. Jim loved the English, Irish and Scottish poets. |
[1] Platypus
Affiliated Society, panel at Left Forum, June 30, 2019, Beyond
sect or movement: What is a political center?
[2] Excerpt
from private email from Jim Creegan, Oct. 3, 2016.
[3] Weekly
Worker edition of April 18, 2007, Ken
Loach’s use of Irish history
[4] Ibid. Beyond sect or movement: What is a political
center? (See note 1)
[5] Ibid. Beyond
sect or movement: What is a political center?
