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| Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama |
[Note: This is part one of a response to recent actions of the leadership of the Socialist Equality Party. For part two see Comments on David North and Joseph Kishore's letter.]
This
open letter is a reply to the slanderous attacks leveled at Shuvu Batta by the
Socialist Equality Party (SEP) after he was expelled from that organization in
February 2021. The SEP is the US section of the International Committee of the
Fourth International (ICFI), which is most well known for producing the World
Socialist Web Site (wsws.org).
Shuvu had been a member of the SEP and its youth section, the IYSSE, for two
and a half years at the time of his expulsion.
In
January 2021, Shuvu learned of a critique of the SEP’s sectarian approach to
the trade unions, written by a provisional member, C, who had recently
resigned. Shuvu reached out to C directly for a copy of the critique and,
agreeing with its main political points, began distributing it to other party
members. Within a week, Shuvu was charged with breaching party discipline and
removed from all meetings and group chats. He was expelled several weeks later,
on February 27. The documents pertaining to the expulsion can be found here.
On March 19, during a national meeting, Peter Ross, a provisional member, made a statement defending Shuvu’s right to criticize the party line and raising concerns about the party’s internal regime and its anti-union positions. On March 22, during a meeting of the IYSSE, Peter again spoke out against how other members had characterized trade unionism, and was cut off mid-sentence on the grounds that “this wasn’t the place” to express his disagreements. When Peter objected to this, he was promptly removed from all party group chats. His provisional membership was revoked two days later in a letter written by the two top leaders of the SEP, David North and Joseph Kishore, and distributed to the entire membership. These documents can be found here. According to sympathetic SEP members, the next national meeting was devoted to hysterical denunciations of both former members, personal slanders aimed at proving their petty bourgeois backgrounds, and craven praise for David North’s letter.
On April 1, because Shuvu is currently
employed as an Amazon Fresh worker, he had the rare opportunity to appear on an NPR podcast to voice his support for the
Amazon BHM1 workers in Alabama fighting to unionize. This prompted Joseph
Kishore, the National Secretary of the SEP (US), to issue another letter to the
entire membership, tearing Shuvu’s comments out of context and peddling a
conspiracy theory accusing him of being an agent of the RWDSU bureaucracy. The
letter, shared with us by a supporter in the SEP, can be viewed here. To
protect Shuvu from potential company retaliation, we have removed his
facility’s location from the document.
Kishore’s letter, an
attempt to fend off any discussion of the SEP’s sectarian politics and
undemocratic internal regime by slandering Shuvu, reveals the utter bankruptcy
of the SEP leadership. These are not the methods of revolutionaries, but of
tinpot dictators and cult leaders. We urge those workers and youth attracted to
the WSWS by its anti-imperialist and socialist posturing to read through the
linked documents—which provide a clear picture of the internal life of the SEP
and the kind of response members can expect should they develop political
differences with the party—and to take up the fight to build a real socialist
movement in the working class.
--
Shuvu Batta and Peter Ross
April
23, 2021
Response to
Joseph Kishore
First of all, I would like to
sincerely thank Kishore for his letter, as it exposes the real nature of the SEP
leadership. At the same time, it’s sad to see an individual that I once
respected and who presents himself as a man of principle peddling conspiracy
theories to the rank and file of his party, many of whom are young people just
dipping their toes into the world of politics.
Let us first cut through Kishore’s
lies.
Kishore writes: “Of the 800,000 Amazon
workers in the United States, one cannot help but wonder how Shuvu Batta
emerged triumphant from NPR’s search and vetting process. He has been an Amazon
employee for only a few months; and he is not even working at the Bessemer
plant. He works at an Amazon “Fresh” facility in XXX and has been trying to
land a job in the company’s human resources department, i.e., in management.
Moreover, given the fact that the predominantly African American composition of
the targeted facility has been central to the RWDSU’s strategy and the focus of
media reporting, NPR’s selection of Batta appears even more peculiar.”
Kishore knows very well how I got onto
the NPR program—it
was through a post on Reddit in an Amazon workers group. The majority of the 63
comments on the post voiced support for the central message,
expressed in its title: Go BHM1 workers, let’s unionize in every
facility and every workplace!
Kishore also attempts to slander me
for trying to better my economic situation by applying for an HR position. By
his logic, the hundreds of thousands of HR workers around the country are all
aligned with the capitalists and are actively working against the interests of
the working class. In reality, they are a part of the working class who utilize
their labor-time ensuring that workplaces are productive and that morale is
high. As Amazon warehouse workers fight to unionize, they must and will rally
the support of “skilled” workers like HR and tech workers, who also need to
collectively organize and unite against their common exploiters: the owners of
Amazon, and the rest of the capitalist class.
After sowing doubt about the
legitimacy of a worker voicing his opinion on a public podcast, Kishore takes
his next leap into the realm of tin-foil conspiracy theories: “The most likely
explanation for Batta’s appearance on the program is that he was recommended to
NPR by the leadership of the RWDSU bureaucracy. The union, which lacks any
significant base among rank-and-file workers, is immensely sensitive to
left-wing criticism—above all, that of the SEP and the World Socialist Web
Site. In one way or another, Batta’s activities came to the attention of the
bureaucracy, which has decided to make use of his services.”
Is this really the most likely
explanation, or could it be that the unionization drive by BHM1 workers has had
mass support among the broader US public? A recent national poll showed the majority of Democrats,
Independents, and even Republicans supporting the BHM1 workers fighting to
unionize. My post, which received popular support from Amazon workers on
Reddit, was viewed by an NPR journalist sympathetic to unionization, who then
gave me the opportunity to come on the podcast and make my points. The RWDSU
bureaucracy was not involved.
Kishore then cites my failure to say
the word “socialism” or attack Jeff Bezos on the podcast as proof of my
political degeneracy.
Despite the fact that my opportunities
to make broader political points on the broadcast were quite limited, I think
my responses could absolutely have been sharper. I will take my experience on
this podcast as a lesson, but I am grateful for the opportunity given to me by
the NPR journalist, and I am grateful for the opportunity to voice my support
for any worker who is risking their job to unionize. To suggest that this
appearance was masterminded by the RWDSU bureaucracy is a slander not just
against me but also the journalist who reached out to me.
The World Socialist Web Site Slanders Amazon’s BHM1 Workers
Now that we have cleared the lies, let
us get to the heart of the matter: the anti-worker politics of the Socialist
Equality Party. In his letter, Kishore cites a comment I made on NPR as proof
of my abandonment of socialism:
Asked what he thought was “the most
important thing for senior Amazon leadership to know,” Batta replied: “Just as
you have a right under the capitalist system to make profits, we have the right
to unionize, and we have the right to actually have a say in the workplace, to
make sure that our conditions are a little more livable.”
My comment was such an unpardonable
sin to Kishore that he felt the need to hurl a series of slurs at me, calling
me a “petit-bourgeois opponent of Marxism,” “a craven apologist for the RWDSU
bureaucracy,” and “a pathetic political fraudster.”
While it is astonishing to witness the
National Secretary of the SEP reduce himself to a schoolyard bully, there is
also a sinister aspect to his slander. Part of its purpose, by spreading a
conspiracy theory and personal information about my job application throughout
the party, is to send a message to all of the members of the Socialist Equality
Party: “If you dare to speak out against our politics, if you dare to voice
support for workers unionizing, we will isolate you, spread lies about you, and
label you a class enemy.”
The fact is that my call for Amazon
workers to unionize was in line with Marx’s words in the Communist Manifesto that communists “fight for the attainment of
the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the
working class, but in the movement of the present they also represent and take
care of the future of that movement.”
The crux of the matter is that the SEP
does not believe that unionizing constitutes an “immediate aim” for the mass of
unorganized workers. The developing movement of the working class is going
directly against a fundamental principle of their politics: rejection of trade
union work. Thus, they have been forced to slander Amazon BHM1 workers as the
puppets of a “top-down” unionization drive despite the fact
that it has inspired thousands of unorganized workers in Amazon and elsewhere
to start unionization campaigns in their workplaces.
The reality is that the BHM1
unionization campaign was started after former union workers at the fulfillment
center, such as Darryl Richardson, went to their local Retail Wholesale and
Department Store Union office to figure out how they could unionize their
facility. With the help of rank-and-file union activists, the BHM1 workers
initiated a disciplined campaign starting in March 2020, rallying their
co-workers within the facility and gathering hundreds of names in support, day
in and day out for months, until more than three thousand workers signed up in
support of the National Labor Relations Board to approve a unionization vote in
January 2021.
Thus, the first vote for unionizing
U.S Amazon warehouse workers was started, a historic achievement spearheaded by
the militant Amazon workers of BHM1.
For years, I had followed the
anti-union line of the World Socialist Web Site and even authored the first anti-union Amazon article on the BHM1
campaign. The article was initially titled “Vote ‘No’ to the UFCW-backed union at
Alabama Amazon facility!” but after viral negative reactions on Twitter
the title was changed to the much tamer “The unionization vote at Alabama Amazon
facility.”
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| The WSWS article as it appeared before the headline was changed |
During the writing of this article, I had started working at an Amazon warehouse. I had mixed feelings about sending the article for publication because its message of telling workers to vote “No” did not at all correspond to my lived experience as an Amazon employee.
Working at an Amazon warehouse is an
incredibly isolating experience. Despite working alongside hundreds of other
workers, it is difficult to make contact with them, let alone engage them in
conversation. We are constantly on the move due to strict rate quotas and
time-off-task penalties. Due to COVID-19, our break rooms have physical
barriers to prevent contact with other workers.
The greatest benefit of an Amazon
union is that it would organize the hundreds of isolated workers in a facility
under a common platform. A “No” vote on unionizing is counterproductive if for
no other reason than this. In union meetings, the once isolated workers would
gain the ability to not only connect with one another but also to advance their
own demands through the formation of worker committees within the union. The
existence of a union provides the Amazon worker a basis on which to wage a
struggle for workplace democracy.
Furthermore, it cannot be denied that
unionized workers make, on average, a much higher wage and gain better benefits
than non-unionized workers. This is because a union provides workers with the
means to organize mass strikes and thus provides them with a weapon against
capital. To call on Amazon workers to vote “No” is to imply that Amazon workers
will not gain any sort of concessions from management through unionizing. The
very fact that Amazon has run a relentless anti-union campaign—holding captive
audience meetings, creating fake social media accounts, violating the election
rules (including through placement of an illegal ballot box), and retaliating
against workers who threaten to unionize—indicates that this is not at all
true. It should be added that the World Socialist Web Site has not produced a
single article that seriously takes up Amazon’s anti-union tactics.
While the WSWS categorizes unions as
irredeemable organizations which socialists must avoid, the reality is that the
working class is well into a period of renewed labor militancy, which is
primarily taking place within the form of the trade-union struggle.
Public sentiment is decisively for
unionization in the US, and increasingly so since the Great Recession of
2007-08, with a Gallup poll released this January estimating that 65 percent of
all Americans approve of labor unions. Unionization rates have also started to increase, partly because union workers faced
fewer job losses during the pandemic and also because more and more sections of
the working class are starting drives to unionize their workplaces.
Furthermore, virtually all of the major strike actions that have taken place in
2020 were among unionized workers.
Yet the most central aim of the SEP’s
political work is to attack “the unions,” which are labeled, across the board,
as “anti-worker” organizations that have become totally integrated into the
state. The implication is undeniably that the destruction of the unions would
be a good thing, since it would free the workers from this instrument of
bourgeois control (and also make them more desperate to form some new kind of
organization).
After the defeat of the BHM1
unionization drive, the WSWS published an article citing the defeat as evidence that
Amazon workers had seen through the RWDSU. While no confidence should be placed
in the RWDSU bureaucracy, which deserves much of the blame for this defeat, the
rank-and-file workers cannot be equated with the bureaucracy by denouncing the
whole of the union. In their efforts to pin the blame for the defeat entirely
on the RWDSU, the WSWS actively downplayed the voter intimidation tactics
employed by Amazon. By taking this stance, and by unequivocally opposing
unionization, the SEP has crossed a class
line, siding with Amazon against the workers.
In stark contrast to the anti-worker
position of the WSWS, militant Amazon workers have learned from the union
defeat in order to strengthen their own unionization campaigns. News has come
out that the Amazon facility at JFK-8 in Staten Island is undergoing a
unionization drive, with the organizers including Chris Smalls of The Congress
of Essential Workers, fighting to build a new union called the Amazon Labor
Union (ALU). The organizers were supportive of the BHM1 pro-union
workers and have explicitly said that they have taken lessons from the
successes and failures of the Bessemer unionization drive so that their effort
succeeds.
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Demonstration in solidarity with Amazon workers, Union Square, New York |
The WSWS’s fantasy rank-and-file committees vs the Marxist path
to workers’ independence
The World Socialist Web Site is an impressive
feat of organization. With only a few hundred members around the world, the
ICFI has managed since 1998 to produce a 6 day-per-week publication, with a
total of more than 60,000 articles. The dedication and self-sacrifice of the
rank-and-file members, who truly believe they are fighting for socialism, is
commendable. The tragedy is that the political line advanced by the WSWS in the
most significant of its articles has for decades gone against the most basic
interests of the working class.
The clearest recent example of this is
the fact that the website, in calling for a “No” vote on the unionization of
Amazon workers, has crudely counter-posed to the unions the fiction of
“independent rank-and-file committees.”
The WSWS claims it has already built a
“network” of these committees, but any critical
reader will note that it has never indicated how many workers are in the
committees. As a former party member, I can testify that the rank-and-file
committees do not have any elected representatives and instead function more as
lecturing groups. The meetings are organized and overseen in every detail by
party representatives, and the few workers in the “committees” play no role other
than tuning in to online calls for reports presented by Socialist Equality
Party members.
Rank-and-file committee meetings
always go about the same way: Comrade D introduces Comrade B, who gives a
report on the pandemic; then comrades H, I, J, and K give more reports.
Finally, often after an hour or more has passed, we get a comment from a
non-party member. He or she says a few brief words, and then comrades H-K rush
to make insightful points about the comment.
No concrete plan of action ever
results from these meetings, partly because the “committees” do not represent
any significant section of the working class. Their real purpose, whether SEP
members realize it or not, is not to provide workers with their own forum or
assist them in building their own democratic organizations, but to produce a
kind of show aimed at recruiting attendees into the party and beginning the
process of indoctrinating them with the “correct” program.
The publication by the WSWS of public
statements by the committees, supposedly written by the rank-and-file workers
themselves, has reached a fever-pitch during the pandemic. To a new member,
these statements, declaring the formation of committees in the auto industry and public education, give the impression of a
real step forward in the construction of new, democratically-controlled
organizations of workers. It quickly becomes clear, however, that this
“network” of committees is all smoke and mirrors.
For example, at its founding in Sept.
2020, the Los Angeles Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee officially had
two non-party members, neither of whom participated in drafting the founding statement, yet it purported to speak
in the name of an entire committee of Los Angeles teachers! In the six months
after its “founding,” the committee had not grown by a single member.
The SEP has pursued this line for
decades, yet these small lecture groups fraudulently labeled as “democratic
organizations of workers” have been its greatest result. Rather than doing the
hard work of organizing, the SEP builds shells of committees, and hopes that by
publicizing them, it can fill them up with actual workers. In practice, the
committees function as front groups, which allow the WSWS to posture as having
influence in the working class. Countless statements (see, for instance, here) use the fictional committees to ventriloquize workers rather than
allowing them to speak for themselves. (This is in line with the fact that WSWS
articles include only those quotes from workers which can be interpreted as
bolstering the political positions that the SEP has already worked out (see,
for instance, “Amazon workers react to the defeat of the RWDSU at
Alabama warehouse”).
The class instinct of workers who join
the “independent rank-and-file committee” meetings is to bring back the
information provided by the SEP to their fellow workers in the unions. While
rank-and-file workers are up against the treacherous labor bureaucracies within
their unions, the SEP provides them no support because the party leadership
actively prevents its cadre from participating in trade union work.
While militant workers struggle alone
to win basic concessions from their employer through their union, the SEP tells
them: “break from your unions and form independent rank-and-file committees!”
Most workers in turn respond: Who are you to tell me what to do? I benefit
by being in my union. I have connections to my fellow co-workers because of the
union. I see how terrible the conditions that non-union workers are going
through are and you—a pamphleteer, who has nothing to do with my workplace, who
has never helped me form strike committees or collected strike funds, who has
never created any sort of defense against the corrupt bureaucrats within my
union—who are you to tell me what to do? Who are you to tell me to throw away
my weapon, the union, for this fantasy rank-and-file committee which has
accomplished nothing concrete whatsoever?
The practical result of the SEP’s
rejection of trade unions is that in moments of strikes or other actions by
union workers, the SEP is unable to influence the workers’ struggle in any
tangible way. This is due to the fact that SEP members have no participation in
union meetings, in organizing strike actions, or in leading left factions
within the union, and are completely isolated from the day-to-day work within
the unions necessary to gain influence among the workers there. The SEP, in
practice, reduces itself to a mere spectator which is only able to report on
the struggles that workers, as a mass, initiate.
Socialists must work within the unions
not because we fetishize the union-form, but because that is where workers,
particularly in the most strategic industries (dock workers, transit workers,
etc.), are concentrated as a mass. If workers come up with new forms of
organization, socialists must also be active within them, but the guiding
principle must be this: we must go where the
workers are!
Trotskyism vs Sectarianism
The SEP dishonestly states that it
carries forward the heritage of Trotskyism. This is a complete fabrication.
Marxists have always understood the need to participate in the day-to-day
struggles of workers. There is a long tradition, starting with Marx and Engels,
of opposition to the positions of anarchists and ultra-left sectarians who
rejected working inside unions, and all attempts to counterpose pure “red trade
unions” to the existing mass organizations. As Trotsky wrote in The Transitional Program, the founding
document of the Fourth International:
The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the
front-line trenches of all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the
most modest material interests or democratic rights of the working class. He
takes active part in mass trade unions for the purpose of strengthening them
and raising their spirit of militancy… Only on the basis of such work within the
trade unions is successful struggle possible against the reformists, including
those of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Sectarian attempts to build or preserve
small “revolutionary” unions, as a second edition of the party, signify in
actuality the renouncing of the struggle for leadership of the working class.
Trotsky stressed the importance of transitional demands to help workers
progress from trade union consciousness to socialist consciousness.
It is necessary to help the masses in
the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demand and
the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of
transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s
consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to
one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.
In the case of the BHM1 unionization
attempt, the victory of the “Yes” vote would have led to a qualitative
transformation of the class struggle for Amazon workers, with a formerly
unorganized section of the working class, struggling through isolated walkouts
and protests, finally gaining access to a higher form of struggle in the form
of an organized mass strike. The task of Marxists, armed with the transitional method, is to push this
struggle to its limit and thus build a bridge
between the emerging trade union consciousness of militant Amazon workers and
the socialist consciousness necessary for revolution.
This would mean advocating not just
for a “Yes” vote but calling on the workers everywhere, organized and
unorganized, to stage demonstrations across the country and the world in
support of BHM1 workers. It would mean rallying the pro-union workers to form a
real rank-and-file committee and
draft demands on what they would fight for after the union was approved. It
would mean calling out the blunders of the union bureaucracy during the struggle, pushing for
door-to-door canvassing for “Yes” votes, holding Q&A sessions with workers,
etc, to make sure that unionization succeeds.
The union drive ultimately failed at
BHM1 not because the union form as a whole was irredeemable but because it
lacked socialist elements actively
fighting for the development of workers’ democracy. The WSWS, by contrast,
sees the defeat of the unionization drive at Bessemer as an expression of the
advanced class consciousness of the workers, who have figured out how rotten
unions are and have come over to the WSWS position. This piece of delusional
thinking avoids the obvious—that the failure of a large percentage of workers
to understand the importance of organizing collectively into a union is a
measure of their lack of class consciousness.
By calling for workers to immediately
break from the union and form “independent rank-and-file committees,” the ICFI
is engaging in a practice that Trotsky called “bureaucratic ultimatism,” which
the Stalinist Communist Party practiced in Germany, effectively splitting the
socialist and the reformist workers, and creating the conditions for the
victory of Nazism.
The Stalinists’ mechanical policy of
equating Social Democracy with Fascism, building only communist-led unions, and
precluding any sort of temporary alliance with reformists is paralleled today
by the SEP’s attempt to equate the whole of the trade unions with the
capitalist state and lump together all left-wing movements outside of their own
sect as the “pseudo-left.” Just as the Stalinist Communist Party isolated its
cadre from the broader worker class with their bureaucratic call for revolutionary
unions and abstention from the struggle for reforms, so too the SEP abstains
from the actual struggles of the working class.
Trotsky long ago pointed the way forward:
But the revolutionary dialectic has
long since pointed the way out and has demonstrated it by countless examples in
the most diverse spheres; by correlating the struggle for power with the
struggle for reforms; by maintaining complete independence of the party while
preserving the unity of the trade unions; by fighting against the bourgeois
regime and at the same time utilizing its institutions; by criticizing
relentlessly parliamentarism – from the parliamentary tribunal; by waging war
mercilessly against reformism, and at the same time making practical agreements
with the reformists in partial struggles.
Without internal democracy and debate there is no revolutionary
party
Kishore is completely unable to answer
the criticisms I have raised above and in previous letter exchanges with the
party leadership. Thus, he has been forced to resort to character
assassination. However, no amount of lies and conspiracies will erase the fact
that the reason for my expulsion was that
I shared a critique of the Socialist Equality Party to other members and refused to stay quiet.
The party leadership actively attempts
to suppress all political differences and maintain a cultish homogeneity of
thought. The “center” (the party leadership based in Detroit) keeps close tabs
on the branches through weekly minutes and swiftly intervenes as soon as any
significant disagreement arises. Members who express disagreement are subjected
to interrogations by branch leaders, aimed not at fostering a true discussion
but at “correcting” the faulty opinion of the dissenting member.
Members are told that a “principled”
political intervention means patiently waiting for any disagreement to pass
through the local branch, until gradually and through some unspecified
procedure, it works its way up to a higher body. Any attempt to raise a
disagreement during a meeting outside of the branch or engage other members
one-on-one is regarded as “disruptive” and even “sabotage.” The SEP claims that
it allows factions, but how can anyone possibly build a faction if they have to
take their marching orders from the branch, which in turn reports directly to
the “center?” Is the “principled” approach for a member with a disagreement to
convince their entire branch of their position and form a dissenting branch?
Any organization that engages in
suppression of internal debate and expels members who dare to question the
party leadership has no right to call itself a revolutionary party. To justify
the SEP’s anti-democratic procedures, Kishore cites a quote from Lenin’s What
is to be done? taken completely out of its historical context. He
writes, quoting Lenin:
‘freedom of criticism’ means
freedom for an opportunist trend in Social-Democracy…
The conclusion the reader is meant to
draw is that any attempt to open a discussion in the party questioning a
position is really an attempt to smuggle into the party a reconciliation with
opportunism. But is this what Lenin was
getting at? Not at all!
Lenin was writing about a specific
situation in which a reformist group of Russian Social Democrats abroad
insisted that the party accommodate the view of the open opportunists such as
Bernstein and work with them under the same umbrella. They supported this
position by adopting the slogan “freedom of criticism.” Does this mean that
Lenin opposed internal debate among those within the party committed to a
revolutionary position? That is not what the historical record shows. The
Bolshevik Party before its degeneration under Stalinism was marked by lively
debates, sometimes even bitter ones, on many fundamental questions. Read
Trotsky’s characterization, from The History of the Russian Revolution:
How could a genuinely
revolutionary organization, setting itself the task of overthrowing the world
and uniting under its banner the most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and
insurgents, live and develop without intellectual conflicts, without groups and
temporary faction formations?
There is also the conclusion of the
preeminent historian of the Russian Revolution, Alexander Rabinowich, who wrote
in his book, The Bolsheviks Come to Power:
… within the Bolshevik
Petrograd organization at all levels in 1917, there was continuing free and
lively discussion and debate over the most basic theoretical and tactical
issues,
and that the party had shifting left,
center, and moderate tendencies within it, right through the revolutionary
period.
Leaders who differed with
the majority were at liberty to fight for their views, and not infrequently,
Lenin was the loser in those struggles.
What a stark difference this paints
between the Bolsheviks and North and Kishore’s dismal regime, which forbids
internal debate and expels members who dare demand it!
The Socialist Equality Party is able
to maintain such a dictatorial inner-party regime because the power within the party is centralized in a
tiny clique. During the 2020 National Congress of the US Socialist Equality
Party, the rank and file had virtually no power to elect their leaders. Members
submitted a slate of nominees for the National Committee to a three-man
election committee. Using COVID-19 as an excuse, the SEP leadership stacked the
election committee with its “outgoing” leadership: David North (the National
Chairperson), Joseph Kishore (the National Secretary), and Jerry White (the
Labor Secretary). Per the SEP constitution, the election committee collates the
nominees and produces their own slate, which the membership then votes up or
down all at once. In preparing its slate,
the election committee is not bound, even on paper, by the nominations of the
membership, and no vote tally is ever released.
The undemocratic regime in the SEP is
sustained, above all, by a culture of groupthink in which members are
encouraged to make “contributions” to discussions which consist of endless
recapitulations of party doctrine. Any attempt to insert a critical thought is
met with widespread derision. Members are made to feel that any disagreement
with the party line reflects a serious shortcoming on their own part, which
will cause them to lose the respect of their comrades.
Members are thus gradually taught to
build up an atmosphere in which any serious disagreement is viewed with
suspicion and hostility. An example from the youth group will serve to
illustrate this point. In February, Peter was slated to give a report to the
IYSSE, and was instructed to focus on a recent article, but chose to devote the
bulk of his report to a discussion of a teachers’ struggle taking place in
Chicago. This unleashed an outright firestorm.
The national secretary of the IYSSE
worked behind the scenes to ensure full attendance at the next meeting—a surprise public takedown launched by
Eric London and Lawrence Porter, two leading members. London began the meeting
with a half-hour-long speech misrepresenting and denouncing Peter’s statements
and making incessant references to his “attitude.” Over the next two hours,
almost every member of the committee saw fit to parade themselves out to
declare that they “agreed with all of the points” and thought the meeting to be
“very significant,” and the meeting concluded with London stating that it was a
“turning point!” This truly bizarre spectacle, amounting to a kind of
watered-down show trial, can only be interpreted as an attempt to ostracize and
intimidate anyone with an oppositional view.
The party’s autocratic inner party
regime raises serious questions about financial parasitism within the SEP.
A deeper search into the WSWS reveals
that it is classified as a domestic profit corporation, with unknown
primary shareholders, despite the fact that the WSWS is itself a collective
product built by the labor of the entire party. The ICFI also directs its
readers and party members to purchase from Mehring Books Inc., a corporation
which according to D&B business directory has generated over
$490K so far in 2021. Each branch in the party is also compelled to extract a
minimum amount of money from supporters and members each month alongside a
yearly fund drive which must easily generate over $100,000. The fact is that
the rank and file have no idea how the
finances of the party, collected through the participation of all members, are
being used, nor do they have any say
in the utilization of funds.
Yes, the union bureaucracy is
degenerate, but at the very least they let the public know how much they are
getting paid by the union membership. For an organization that consistently
rails against the union bureaucracy, a question must be asked: David North,
Joseph Kishore, and other leading members of the SEP, why do you not have the
integrity to reveal the same?
Questions that the SEP leadership must answer to its members if
it retains any shred of revolutionary integrity
Any information about the SEP’s
composition and finances is tightly guarded by the leadership, on the grounds
that releasing any such information to the cadre would jeopardize security.
When Peter raised the demand for the party to reveal its total membership to
the rank and file, a leading member responded indignantly that this would be
almost tantamount to releasing personal addresses. This is a truly ludicrous rationalization
for keeping the membership in the dark. Yes, the party needs to take measures
to protect its members as best as it can from victimization by the state or
right-wing forces, but what does that have to do with revealing the membership
figures or having some level of accountability regarding finances?
Like the trade unions, we understand
that the SEP is itself a contradictory organization. Despite the sectarian,
even cultish, atmosphere cultivated by the leadership, its ranks contain many
genuine revolutionaries who have been drawn to the party because it presents
itself as an organization that is leading the fight for a socialist future.
These are professionals, teachers, low-wage workers, and students who have
devoted themselves heroically to the development of the party, sacrificing
countless hours for the cause. We do not want to see these genuine
revolutionaries waste their lives following a political line that actively goes
against the interests of the working class.
With this in mind, we propose that the
rank and file within the SEP raise the following demands:
1 The
release of basic information on the party to all members, including the total
number of members and the growth of the party over time.
2 A
full financial audit, to include answers to the following questions:
2.a
How are the party finances controlled?
2.b
What is the yearly revenue of the
party and where is this money coming
from?
2.c
How much are the party staff and
leadership paid?
2.d
Who are the shareholders of the WSWS?
3 The
development of a party-wide forum in which ALL members can raise their ideas
and engage in debate.
4 That
the methods of slander and victimization of dissident members be repudiated.
5 That
new elections for the leadership of the SEP be arranged forthwith allowing for
a direct vote by the membership in selecting all levels of party leaders.
6
That the party reconsider its position
on the unions and on the heritage of Trotskyism and The Transitional Program.
Finally, I would like to thank the
leadership of the SEP for showing me exactly what a revolutionary party is not!
A revolutionary party is not an
organization that actively avoids practical work in the working class. A
revolutionary party is not an organization that rejects the use of reforms for
building the path to revolution. A revolutionary party is not an organization
that responds to criticisms of its political line with personal slander. A
revolutionary party is not an organization that fears internal debate and
democracy.
The SEP slanders many of its political
enemies on the left with the meaningless term “pseudo-left.” If we take this
term to mean an anti-worker group that cloaks itself in left-wing rhetoric,
then there are few more worthy of the title than the SEP itself.
-- Shuvu Batta
See also:
The critique which solidified my
differences with the party and led to my expulsion:
“Once
again on the Question of the Trade Unions and the Tasks of the Party” by C:
For a deeper insight into the history
and nature of the Socialist Equality Party, read:
Marxism
without its Head or its Heart
by Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner
For a thorough critique of David
North’s “Why
are Trade Unions Hostile to Socialism?”
Read:
The
trade union form and the butchery of dialectics by Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner
The founding document of the Fourth
International, which the SEP has abandoned in practice:
The Transitional
Program by Leon
Trotsky
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