Being “Wrong” in the Socialist Party
I recently quit as editor of The Socialist, the magazine of the Socialist Party. After just two issues, I found the intolerance and general stupidity of many of the Editorial Board members that I had to work with too frustrating to continue. There’s real work that has to be done for the movement, and I am no longer willing to waste my time on fruitless endeavors.
I’m thinking about leaving the party altogether, but that’s a much tougher decision to make, as I have been a member for nearly ten years – since I was 17 years old.
Clearing out my archives, I find an article that I wrote for the journal of the party’s 100th anniversary conference in 2001. At the time, I was being hounded out of office by a caucus of pinheads. I could still find virtue in the party back then. I post it now for a strange sense of reassurance.
Among the Socialist Party’s many virtues over the last one hundred years has been its ability, and the ability of its members, to be wrong. Multi-tendency before there was even a word for such a thing, the party has always been home to wildly divergent opinions and the occasional faction fight. With so many different factions and tendencies, somebody has to be wrong at any given moment. I find this so reassuring.
The party’s early right-wing, made up of Social Democratic politicians in the modern European sense, over-emphasized voting and cynically limited their union activity to cajoling striking workers to “Vote Socialist!” Too often they embraced mainstream racism and xenophobia. Most curiously, they aggressively opposed the Industrial Workers of the World and led a crusade to expel from the party Wobblies who advocated “direct action” (then more confused with violent terrorism than today). Still, they couldn’t be all wrong. They won office and enacted legislation. Clearly, masses of people supported them.
One of my greatest heroes is “Big Bill” Haywood, the most prominent Wobbly to be expelled, precisely because of his wrong decisions. In the SP, he exacerbated the rightwing with vague and irresponsible talk of “direct action” that hinted at violence, precisely the type that he eschewed within the IWW. It was almost as though he wanted to be martyred rather than face a frustrating faction fight, or maybe he was just a natural contrarian (Our party’s had plenty of them, too). On strike, Haywood counseled a crude sort of pre-Gandhian civil disobedience. It’s his greatest legacy.
His worst legacy is that he fled to Russia to avoid a long prison term for opposing the war. This is why I sympathize with “Big Bill.” Disillusioned by his government, which had usually vindicated him when he was innocent (at least until whatever “crisis” that put him in jail had been averted), and by his own IWW, which had rejected him, Haywood went to the one place where he would be least appreciated: Bolshevik Russia! It was the sort of stupid mistake that comes from wounded pride and that any one of us can and does make.
Sam Friedman, who died six years too soon for me to meet him, is another SP character that I enjoy. Maybe it’s because he did so many things that I have done (Chaired the New York local, edited the NY Call – at a time when it was actually impressive to do such things) or would like to do (He organized a mutual aid society that helped bail party activists out of jail and pay legal bills). Maybe it was because he was such a set-in-his-ways pain in the ass. He stuck with Social Democrats, USA in the 1973 split because he did not believe in splits and they technically won the final vote. He hated their politics and stayed close to the SP so he could be around people who still used the “S” word. He telegrammed the party’s 1983 convention: “DEEPLY REGRET INABILITY TO ATTEND. DISAGREEING WITH SOME OF YOUR JUDGEMENTS AND CONCLUSIONS, I STILL ADMIRE AND LOVE YOUR TENACITY, COURAGE AND DEVOTION TO SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES. MORE POWER TO YOU.”
It’s a great encouragement to read in Rob Tucker’s brief history that Eugene V. Debs had such personal animosity towards Daniel Deleon and mistrusted anyone recently associated with him. Debs, too, is a hero, but in history books he comes across as too perfect. Saints belong in the Bible, not the Socialist Party. It’s the Eugene Debs who said, “While there is a lower class I, am in it; While there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison I am not free” that inspired me to join the Socialist Party, but it’s the Eugene Debs who called Daniel Deleon a “black-hearted scoundrel” that I can relate to.
Pages From a Worker’s Life
My studies have provoked in me a keen interest in the Trade Union Education League, and its founder, William Z. Foster. The T.U.E.L. was a rank and file movement in the 1920’s to organize millions of workers in the basic industries along industrial lines (that is, in “one big union”). Where this differed from the Industrial Workers of the World was a dogged insistence on working within the existing AFL craft unions and “amalgamating” them.
Foster seemed to be a tireless organizer as well as a savvy strategist, but his own beliefs eventually became muddled by the Stalinist party line so that the “real” Foster, in his later years, is something of an enigma.
I sought out Foster in his own words. The only book of his that remains “in print” is “Pages From a Worker’s Life,” from International Publishers. One of the great things about International is that the cover price remains the asking price no matter how old the printing is, so that this fine book can still be had for $3.25. (One of the other great things about International is that the adventurous reader can travel to that storied building on 23rd Street, up the rickety manually operated elevator, to their offices to shop.)
“Pages” does not contain much of Foster’s theoretical or polemical writing, nor much of a standard biography. This seems to be outtakes from his other books; delightful stories and anecdotes that fit nowhere else. It’s a brisk and enjoyable read that makes me sorely miss the lack of adventure in my own life. Much of it is hard to believe. His jobbing, hoboing, seafaring and organizing seem to constantly place him in positions where he narrowly escapes sudden death or tortured lynching. Still, it’s not that implausible.
Foster’s ability to reevaluate, correct and criticize his own decisions is refreshing, as is his ability to admit that he misjudged a man, generously providing space to acknowledge the goodness of John L. Lewis, as well as an obscure building trades business agent who turned out to be a dedicated organizer in the 1919 steel strike.
As early as 1912, Foster pioneered the notion that the last thing labor radicals should do is abandon the mainstream trade unions to the bureaucrats and conservatives. He spent many years in the political wilderness as the IWW absorbed much of the energy of the labor radicals of the era. However, when a triumphant Lenin endorsed Foster’s model of “boring from within,” his organization became a cause celibre among the new throngs of Communists. He joined the Communist Party, and joined his cause, and the cause of his organization, with that of the CP. The ranks of both the T.U.E.L. and the CP swelled and their campaigns laid the building blocks of the CIO that was to come.
Years later, Stalin led Foster out of the AFL and back into independent union organizing. Foster remained an apologist for Stalin to his dying day, which makes the search for the real William Z. Foster, much like the search for the real Michael J. Obermeier, that much more intriguing.
Searching for Comrade Obermeier
On September 9, 1947, federal agents stormed the offices of Hotel & Restaurant Employees Local 6 and arrested the president of the union, Michael J. Obermeier, on politically motivated immigration charges. Obermeier had been the president of Local 6 for the last ten years, and a militant union leader for food workers in the city since 1922, having organized hundreds of hotels and restaurants and thousands of poor, immigrant, minority and female workers in the hospitality industry to fight for respect and dignity on the job, higher pay and lower hours.
The Red Scare was the perfect pretense to chase troublemakers like Obermeier out of the industry, and the Taft-Hartley Act (passed two weeks earlier) already laid a legal framework to remove Communists from union office, but Obermeier was an even easier target because he had not entered the country legally in 1913. Despite his German translation and propaganda work in support of the US war effort during World War II, and his repeated applications for U.S. citizenship, he was deemed to be an undesirable alien subversive shortly after the war.
The feds were likely alerted to Obermeier’s position, status and “threat” by the officers of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union who had welcomed Obermeier and his comrades into the unions only a decade earlier in an effort to drive the mafia out of the union and organize the thousands of workers who were crying out for the union but were suddenly shocked – SHOCKED – to find out that the officers of their largest local were COMMUNISTS!
It was a scenario that played itself out in countless CIO unions that were “bored from within” by Communist elementa, but the H&RE were an AFL union that had invited the Communists in before they spat them out. The officers of Local 6, and the Hotel Trades Council to which it was affiliated, were faced with the same choice of repudiating the Communist Party and their earlier politics, or being thrown overboard. Obermeier’s close partner, Jay Rubin, rejected him and their radical politics and claimed allegiance to the U.S. flag and the bureaucratic union regime, and he continued to lead the union for much of the rest of the century.
Obermeier took the fall for the New York local’s radicalism. He was found guilty of perjury for having denied past or present Communist affiliations when he had applied for U.S. citizenship, even though he had been a member of the party from 1930 until 1939. He was deported to Germany on December 11, 1952 and died in Spain on May 28, 1960.
Much remains obscure about Obermeier. Who was he? Where, exactly did he come from? How did he come to the independent syndicalist trade union movement? And how from there was he attracted to the Communist Party and the Trade Union Education League? Did he recruit Jay Rubin to the CP, or did Jay Rubin join first? What political beliefs did he have that were independent of the CP? What happened to him when he was repatriated to Germany? And what the fuck was a German Communist (and, I suspect, a Jew) doing in Fascist Spain?
I have been studying Obermeier, Local 6 and the movements that spawned it, for most of the year and I am not much closer to the answer. My research continues.
I Want Candy
When I was younger, my favorite treat at the candy shops in the malls was the red licorice shoelace. I’d tie them into knots and gobble them up before I’d make it to the parking lot. I have been craving them for some time, and I think I may never taste them again.
The problem is that, a number of years ago, some genius and his focus groups decided to change the formula for the red shoelace licorice, making it taste like Twizzlers. Extensive field research has brought me to the conclusion that all shoelace licorice throughout the malls of America is produced in the same factory, by the same Oompa Loompa gulag, because it all tastes like Twizzlers. If I want a Twizzler, I’ll buy a goddamn Twizzler. I really don’t understand this switch, as a business decision. Why be just like a ubiquitous, multi-million dollar product?
Two years ago, I discovered at Penn Station a candy from Necco called Danish Ribbons that, lo and behold, tasted just like shoelace licorice. I bought a roll just about every day on the way home to the Long Island Rail Road. Unfortunately, this only lasted a few weeks before Hudson News stopped carrying it. My recent internet sleuthing has revealed that the candy has been discontinued. Curse you, candy oligarchs!
It’s a bitter reminder of another traumatic candy loss: the original Good and Fruity. Good and Fruity is the sweeter sequel product to the candy covered black licorice product, Good and Plenty. The original Good and Fruity was candy covered red licorice, but many years ago, before shoelace went Twizzler, Good and Fruity replaced its licorice filling with jelly bean-like goo.
So, I’ve been on the search for another candy with that old licorice flavor. I have tried Kookaburra licorice (tastes like gelatinous fruit snacks), Panda licorice (tastes like prunes), Finska licorice (tastes like fruit roll-ups). I’m running out of options. I’ve been searching various “olde tyme candy shoppe” websites, but flavor is a hard thing to describe. One promises red licorice laces that are “not the shiny red ‘licorice’ laces that taste like those famous spiral red licorice sticks. Instead ‘Old Fashioned’ tasting laces from our youth.” I have my doubts. In any event, I can’t figure out how to order them.
I’m intrigued by Red Vines, since some descriptions have hinted that they might be the flavor I’m looking for. Besides, I have heard that Red Vines plus Mr. Pibb equals crazy delicious (of course, neither of those products can actually be purchased in New York on a lazy Sunday or any other day).
It has been suggested to me that perhaps the only way that I will ever taste real red licorice laces again is to launch a campaign, but I think I have my hands full with other, more pressing campaigns. So get to work, Internet! Launch the online petitions. Start the blogs. Let’s get some banner ads. You can do it!
And if you can’t, then hopefully my crazy pregnant woman cravings will switch back to pickles in a few days.