The Western Socialist July-August, 1955
Note 2004: The Socialist Union of America was a split from the then trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (US) whose existence lasted from 1954-59. It’s most famous member was Harry Braverman.
A Debate between the Socialist Union of America and the World Socialist Party
On April 17, 1955. a debate was held at the Community Church of Boston, between Rev. Hugh Weston, Chairman of the Eugene Debs Club of Greater Boston and member of the Socialist Union of America. and George Gloss of Local Boston, World Socialist Party. After the debate Rev. Weston was requested to write up his side of the debate for publication in THE WESTERN SOCIALIST. Although the statement subsequently submitted is not exactly what Rev. Weston put forth at the debate, it is nevertheless quite representative of his views and as such we wish to present it to our readers with a SOCIALIST answer.
THE SOCIALIST UNION OF AMERICA
The way to socialism was pointed out by many people, particularly Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Eugene Debs. Of course, these different people disagreed with each other on many points, and even accused each other of treason in the case of Stalin and Trotsky. Yet it is only by the stUdy of these and other authors that we can find the tactics and strategy of scientific socialism and its highest form. utopian society, in which wages and prices, money – all of commodity exchange – are abolished.
THE SOCIALIST PATH
In order for the World Socialist Party to find its way, in alliance with the Socialist Union of America and other groups, to the scientific socialist path. it is necessary to read, absorb, and understand the historic records of the fight to establish the International Workingmen’s Association, the fight for the Paris Commune, the Marxist fight to spread the German military aggression across Bohemia, the Marxist fight to aid the Northern military offensive in behalf of capitalism against the South – great struggles in which Marx himself personally participated with his talent and his energy.
All these men had rich experience which only phrase-mongers and playboy revolutionists would ignore. Learning a path means learning from all experience of the past, discarding and amending that which is not applicable to a given country in a given time. There are those, however, who either 1) repeat by rote old formulas or 2) make up inventions out of fantasies and not out of historic experiences. For example, no detailed set of principles of a party could possibly apply to a half-dozen or so countries at a given time, as the World Socialist Party holds.
This is a lazy man’s way of getting a program for socialism. To get a program you have to study each country and each historical epoch. This is hard work.
Then there are the perfectionists. If we could create a perfect society overnight it would be a pleasant thing to do – although problems would of course continue to exist even in the “perfect” society – how boring if it were not so! But we cannot do this. If Russia is a capitalist country, as the World Socialist Party maintains, then, even if we educate the majority to socialism in America, We Will then have to arm to the teeth in order to protect our American socialist homeland from invasion by capitalist, aggressive Russia. So, the only way we can get the perfect society, if we follow the World Socialist Party fantasies to their logical conclusion, is to educate the majority of the people all over the world to socialism. including the Russian workers. Hence, we must now wait until the Russians are free, have a democratic society, and then we will educate them to socialism, Brothers, it is a long way off!
SOCIALIST COUNTRIES
The Socialist Union of America and the Debs Club of Boston hold that the Soviet Union and China are socialist nations, albeit nations with many, many faults and shortcomings. They are backward nations, and totalitarian nations, but, slowly, through the decades. wending their way up the historical ladder. The Socialist Union of America holds that socialism is bursting, like a brilliant nova, into the darkness of the times, that the whole of mankind is bustling With hope, and that what Marx called the “prehistory” of man is coming to an end. True human history is beginning, and the whole earth is trembling with activities and the skies are filled with the songs of men who are breaking their chains.
While the World Socialist Party cannot see but pessimism in the times, capitalist totalitarianism throughout Russia, China, more capitalism in America, etc. – the Socialist Union of America sees reason for optimism all around. We have much to do. We have to expose and depose the Attlees, the Reuthers, and all the other fake “socialists” as well as the capitalists. But, in America, we must actually support even Reuther if he helps form a Labor Party – for a certain amount of time. Each step is a step toward the Day of the Jubilee. We must not leap, but walk, step by step, so that we will not fall. First we support the labor fakers – pointing out to everyone that they are fakers – and then, when we have used them to help us take another step, we oppose them, pointing out that we said they were fakers all the time.
REFORMS
Reforms? Certainly, reforms! We support reforms and we tell people that you cannot reform capitalism. But just because it is useless to reform capitalism – that is all the more reason for supporting to the hilt the blundering efforts of groping man to reform the un-reformable system. How else shall we be at their side, help explain to them why it is hopeless to push back the avalanche – even while we give them a brotherly hand? Because a stubborn child is doing something the wrong way, do we desert it? No, we help him do it the wrong way and patiently and lovingly explain WHY IT IS THE WRONG WAY. And we will win the love of the stubborn child, and he will cease to be stubborn, and he will learn, and he will lead.
Socialism, the first stage toward the “Utopian Society,” is an intellectual, an emotional, and a physical struggle. Into it we put our bodies, our physical bodies – we put them into strikes and even before bullets when fascist terror strikes. Into it we put our minds, and we win minds. And into it we put our emotions, and we win workers by motions as well as by ideas.
We learn from workers and they learn from us. There is a dialectic between the socialist movement and the people. We learn from one another. We ask them what to do. We ask them what emotions they feel. We ask them what we can do to help.
And even when we find them wrong, we do not desert them. We build a movement not just by ideas but by love. We build it by songs and by flags and by parades. There will be those who will understand With their minds. There will be those who Will not unders,tand with their minds, but win understand with their hearts. And there will be those who will understand both with their hearts and with their minds. And these last must be the organized movement, the organized party. The time is at hand.
The Socialist Union of America and the Eugene Debs Club of Greater Boston are moving generally in the right direction. We challenge the World Socialist Party to cooperate with us in helping the people with their reforms, building their Unions, educating them on where and why they are wrong even while we help them build a Labor Party. We invite all persons who want to do these things to cooperate as individuals, to help the people in their efforts to defend freedom and liberty, living standards, and establish world peace.
Let us leave our towers of isolation and .sectarianism.
REPLY – WORLD SOCIALIST PARTY
Between the position as set forth in the above by Hugh Weston and that of the World Socialist Party and its companion parties in other lands, there is a seemingly unbridgeable chasm because of one certain difference that makes all the difference. His concept of socialism (During the question period at the debate, Rev. Weston said: “It is possible for a man to be a millionaire under socialism if he does it by his own effort.”) and the nature of a socialist society is as different from ours as it could possibly be. What we call socialism, Mr. Weston labels “utopian society” and what he calls socialism, we recognize as capitalism in its state or nationalized form.
SOCIALIST “AUTHORITIES”
Perhaps the confusion which Mr. Weston appears to suffer from is caused by the confusion of most of the authorities he lists. He might have extended his roster of “socialist” theoreticians by adding the names of Hitler, Mussolini, Huey Long, Dr. Townsend and Norman Thomas. He would Wind up being no less mixed-up as to what socialism is all about than he now is. Certainly we can find no better authorities as to what socialism is than Marx and Engels. But not because of their activities in the International Workingmen’s Association, their support of the Paris Commune or any of the other struggles they participated in or analyzed, important as these undoubtedly were at the time. Marx and Engels have gone down in history as the founders of scientific socialism chiefly because of their prodigious efforts in the analysis of capitalist society and the materialist conception of history which they developed.
We would suggest that the members of the Socialist Union of America could do no better than to master the principles of Marxian economics and the materialist conception of history. There is nothing like a thorough grounding in Capital or Anti-Duhring, for example, to dispel the myths later built up by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Debs that a changed label or an assumption of much, most, or all of the individual capitalists’ prerogatives by a state can alter the basic relationships of class society; or that some sort of magic exists about the word “socialism” or “socialist” that revolutionizes capitalism without in any way altering its basic relationships.
FANTASIES
Mr. Weston accuses us of either repeating “by rote” or making up “inventions out of fantasies and not out of historic experience.” As evidence he points in scorn to the common Declaration of Principles which unites socialists of “a half-dozen or so countries.” The gentleman is obViously unaware of the fact that capitalism is an international system of society With a common set of economic relationships regardless of any differences in governmental form. Because we refuse to allow superficial differences that might exist in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, for example, to befog the fact that capitalism exists in all of those countries, we are accused of being “lazy.”
Not just these countries, but the predominant part ‘Of the world today, including Russia and, to a considerable extent, China, is capitalist – has an economic system under which the vast majority toil for a wage ‘or a salary while suffering poverty and insecurity; while a minority are able to live quite comfortably from surplus-value wrung from the working class. Much as Mr. Weston abhors “laziness” we can only bring to his attention this fact: activity which is founded upon misunderstanding is much worse than laziness. Any political activity today which labels itself “socialist” but which organizes ‘or attempts to organize workers for state capitalism is worse than useless.
Our common principles rather than an example of laziness on our part, denote that we, at least, are aware of the international nature of capitalism and its common basis regardless of where it is organized. We are not perfectionists, nor utopians. Rather, we are materialists. We understand that socialism is a society which is only possible to obtain because of the development which has transpired under capitalism; that the world must first go through capitalism before it can arrive at socialism. Russia, for example, was suffering under a semi-feudal, agrarian economy when in 1917 the revolutions overthrew the Czars and the Social democrats under Kerensky. Mr. Weston and those who suffer from similar delusions would have us believe that in the short period between February and October of 1917, the Russian peasants and workers learned so much about capitalism that they had their :fill, overthrew it and established socialism, or a “socialist” country.
These dreamers would likewise have us believe that the primitive Chinese peasants in their countless millions and the comparatively few wageworkers in that land. Overthrew capitalism, a system which they could possibly know little or anything about. That one who professes to understand socialism and what it implies could label the Chinese revolution “socialist” is indeed fantastic.
THE REAL WORLD
Yes. Mr. Weston, socialism is an international system and before it can be established the workers of the predominant part of the world will have to be ready for it. But this does nat mean that a “socialist” America would have to “arm to the teeth” against an aggressive, capitalist Russia until we have educated the Russian workers to an understanding and desire for socialism. A socialist awareness develops at a fairly even rate in all capitalist nations. There are no indications of a greater awareness of the need for socialism on the part of the American workers than is the case in Russia today or any other developed capitalist country. This “bursting like a brilliant nova” of “socialism” throughout the world that Mr. Weston sees is truly a figment of his imagination; a hallucination if ever there was one. Let him tell the thousands and hundreds of thousands of slave laborers in Russian and Chinese prison camps that they have broken “their chains.” Let him tell this to the millions of workers in those “socialist” countries who toil long hours far a pittance to maintain their poverty that they are free. The answer might well be, if they have such an expression in those tongues: “Tell it to Sweeney!”
Yes, America and the rest of the capitalist world is still some distance from socialism. But let not Mr. Weston and his comrades be too much upset by this. They might just as well realize that until the workers in their millions understand and desire socialism we won’t have it; that it is just as easy and much more fruitful to devote one’s time to genuine socialist propaganda rather than to participate in the process of hoodwinking the workers by forming Labor Parties or disseminating the philosophies of Bolshevism. Therein lies only further disappointment, drudgery and doom for the working class – ‘truly a 3D horror feature.
DECEIT AS A POLICY
It is amazing indeed that one should advocate at one and the same time, the need to explain to our fellow workers that reforms are a snare and a delusion – and that we should fight to attain these snares and delusions. He wants the workers to support politicians whom he himself knows as fakers! After all of the history that has transpired since Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin and Debs propounded this type of theory, Mr. Weston wants the working-class to go for more of the same. He’ says we should not desert a “stubborn child” just because he is doing something the wrong way. Rather, he says, we should help the child do that thing the wrong way while at ‘the same time explain why it is ‘Wrong in order to win the love of the stubborn child!
We submit that one who insists upon continuing to do something in the wrong way, long after it has been proved to be the wrong way and a right way established, is little better than a fool. Would Mr. Weston advocate that medical students, for example, be trained in the use of leeches as a treatment for sickness in general, or that surgeons should develop their skill without regard for the germ theory – that in this way they can best learn that blood-letting by leeches is not a cure-all, or that unsterilized instruments and dirty hands are not the best weapons With which to attack an operation? How many more millions of workers does Mr. Weston want to see suffer poverty, dismemberment and even death before he feels they are ready to hear the correct story?
THE SOCIALIST TASK
We cannot accept the gentleman’s “challenge” to cooperate With him and his organization in his admitted scheme to further hoodwink our fellow workers – to take advantage of their present misunderstanding of historical processes and to enjoy a favored position as a “vanguard.” Rather we would prefer to go on as usual, doing our part in explaining capitalism to our fellow workers, small as our present efforts might be; realizing that until the working-class itself in its vast numbers awakens to the need for a new society, that leaders and vanguards can only lead us into newer forms of capitalist oppression, rather than into class-less society – socialism.
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