BY JIM ALTENBERG
OAKLAND, California - "Paul Montauk was a veteran cadre of
the Socialist Workers Party," said SWP national secretary Jack
Barnes. The term cadre is important, he explained. It refers to
a core group of trained, experienced personnel who train and
lead others. To forge a cadre takes time and effort. It links
individuals and generations. The word originates in military
terminology, which makes sense since every political question
today will ultimately be settled in combat.
Some 170 people gathered at the Amalgamated Transit Union hall here October 18 to celebrate the life of Paul Montauk, a 60-year cadre of the SWP. Montauk died September 29 at age 76 of complications of pneumonia. People who had worked and fought alongside of Montauk over decades came from around California, and from as far away as Miami, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Vancouver. Many of Paul's relatives were present, including his wife, Mary Lou, and his daughters, Susan and Juliette. Around three dozen people sent messages to the meeting, some of which were read aloud as part of the program. (An article on Montauk's life and political contributions appeared in the October 12 issue of the Militant.)
Norton Sandler, organizer of the Socialist Workers Party branch in the San Francisco Bay Area, welcomed participants on behalf of the party branch. He said that Montauk had become active in politics as a teenager, when he joined protests against fascist Jersey City mayor Frank Hague and his goons in 1937. This experience would never be lost on Montauk. "He looked the fascists in the face in New Jersey at 17 and knew what would happen if they won," Barnes pointed out. He learned in the face of Hague's cops and thugs that you had to organize without amateurism, and in such a way that you knew you could count on your fellow fighters completely. Paul joined the SWP in 1939. His political life spanned six decades, and remained inseparable from the priorities and activities of the party.
Sandler recognized two Irish freedom activists who were at the meeting, John Fogarty and Kate Boyle, both of the Irish American Unity Conference, a group that has been in the forefront of defense of the "H-Block 3," Irish political prisoners facing extradition from the United States to Northern Ireland. Two days earlier Terry Kirby, Kevin Barry Artt, and Pol Brennan had been released on bail pending a new extradition trial (see article on page 4). Sandler read a letter that Kirby sent to the meeting, which began, "I wish to extend my condolences to the family, friends, and comrades of Paul Montauk. I know he was a true soldier in the struggle for peace and justice not only in Northern Ireland but everywhere we fight oppression."
Also recognized was meeting participant Jackie Santos, a fighter for Puerto Rican independence and an activist in Comite '98, an organization that promotes the Puerto Rican independence struggle.
Part of proletarian core of SWP branch
Paul Montauk had a positive impact on many young people who
joined the communist movement in the early 1960s, Mary-Alice
Waters told the meeting. Waters, editor of the Marxist magazine
New International, had moved to Berkeley, California in 1963 to
enter graduate school at the University of California and build
the Young Socialist Alliance there. She worked with Montauk
during those tumultuous years, and joined the Oakland/Berkeley
branch of the SWP.
The Oakland/Berkeley branch was not particularly strong, Waters explained, but like most branches it included a proletarian core of cadres who were decisive in winning radicalizing youth to communist politics. "Paul and Mary Lou Montauk were examples of the stability and continuity of the communist movement," Waters said. They helped make possible the transformation of the Young Socialist Alliance into a nationwide, influential revolutionary youth organization that was part of the growing youth radicalization and movement against the Vietnam War that was soon to come.
The YSA from its inception had an inseparable connection to defense of the Cuban revolution, Waters noted. That together with the defense of the "Bloomington 3" forged the YSA as a centralized revolutionary youth organization that decided upon and carried out common campaigns effectively and professionally.
In May, 1963, three members of the YSA in Bloomington, Indiana, were charged under a state anti-Communist law with "sedition" for their political activity on the University of Indiana campus. They had held protests in defense of Cuba during the October 1962 "missile crisis," and had been viciously attacked for it. The YSA around the country immediately threw themselves into a campaign to get all charges dropped against the "Bloomington 3," as they came to be known. They raised thousands of dollars over the four-year long campaign, which ended in victory.
Waters described how the YSA worked with others to raise funds for the defense fight in the Bay Area, including benefits by the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
The Bloomington case was also part of the growing fight to challenge restrictions on free speech and political activity that were enforced on many campuses, explained Waters. The high point of the fight was in Berkeley, where administration bans on so-called off campus political activity led to a Free Speech Movement that included mass sit-ins and rallies of up to 18,000 people. YSA members were central leaders of the Free Speech Movement, and Montauk played in important role in turning the cadres of the SWP toward the developing campus struggles.
Antiwar movement and Black struggle
What was happening in Berkeley was part of international
developments, Waters noted. The year 1964 began with anti-
imperialist demonstrations in what was then known as the Canal
Zone, a U.S. colonial enclave surrounding the Panama Canal. A
workers and farmers government had been established in Algeria.
The Cuban Revolution was consolidating itself, and its impact
was reverberating throughout Latin America. Nelson Mandela was
on trial for taking up armed struggle against the racist South
African government. Malcolm X had broken with the Nation of
Islam, and young fighters challenged segregation in the Freedom
Summer campaign. In the Bay Area, there were battles over
desegregation and affirmative action.
Struggles like these, which would deepen in the following year with the beginnings of the anti-Vietnam War movement, opened the way to renew the Socialist Workers Party after the long retreat of the 1950s. Montauk became a leader of the Vietnam Day Committee, a group on the Berkeley campus that organized a 36-hour teach-in on the war that drew crowds of 12,000 people. All who wanted to debate the war were invited to participate. Unlike the SWP and YSA, the Communist Party declined to participate, saying that their presence would hurt the movement. The U.S. State Department was also invited but did not show.
As young opponents of the war worked through the problems of building the anti-war movement, Paul paid close attention to discussing politics and recruiting the activist youth to the YSA. This continued to be true through the decade, as battles opened for Black and Chicano studies raged at San Francisco State University and the anti-war movement grew in size and influence.
As Waters explained, it was not obvious at the time that the party would be in the thick of these fights. There was resistance from some in the party whose habits and expectations had been shaped by a political period of little opportunity for activity and recruitment. Montauk was one of the cadres who pointed the party toward the youth. He did it with enthusiasm and the serious, professional attitude that a revolutionary cadre aims to instill in others. He understood that the dog days were over.
Waters concluded her remarks by pointing out that in the 1960s, student youth were moving into action ahead of the working class, whose organizations remained on the sidelines of the unfolding struggles in the United States. Today, for the first time since the 1940s, the working class is ahead of the students. Resistance among workers and in the trade unions themselves has begun to spread, and opportunities for young people to participate in political activity in the working class can be found everywhere. Conditions are better today than in the 1960s to win students and other youth to a proletarian party. Montauk was always confident that this would occur, and in the last years of his life he turned toward the young people coming around the Young Socialists with the same enthusiasm and seriousness that he had three decades prior.
`Youth can emulate Paul's conduct'
Samantha Kern spoke on behalf of the National Executive
Committee of the Young Socialists. Kern is California state
organizer of the YS.
Kern explained that she had learned a great deal about Montauk's life from reading about it in the Militant. She said Paul showed how communists can politically respond and function as revolutionaries during wartime. As a young person facing the coming horror that would be World War II, Montauk adopted pacifist views. But he became convinced politically that revolutionaries had to do political work in the military, where millions of other working-class youth would be drafted. Later, he organized against the Vietnam War. "Young people," Kern said, "can emulate his conduct in relation to imperialist war."
"Paul's life," she said, "was an example for all young workers who deeply feel the alienation of working under capitalism. He was one of the first communists I ever met. Meeting a communist who had dedicated his entire life to building a party that could lead workers and farmers to victory had a big impact on me."
Kern pointed out that one of the last public political meetings Paul attended was a YS west coast regional conference, which took place September 5-6. He later said that this was one of the most important political meetings he'd attended in years, and made even clearer the need for the San Francisco SWP branch to put all its effort to winning youth to the communist movement.
In a message sent to the meeting Joel Britton, an oil worker and a leader of the SWP's trade union work, stated, "Confidence. Confidence in his beliefs, in his class and in its organized vanguard. That is what comes to mind when I think about my encounters with Paul over a span of three decades."
Paul was a founding member of the SWP's Oakland branch, arriving here in 1946 and immediately jumping into labor struggles and broader political activity, Osborne Hart told participants at the memorial meeting. Hart, a member of the San Francisco branch of the SWP and the United Transportation Union, worked alongside Montauk in the party's national office in the late 1970s as well as in San Francisco over the past six years.
In the '70s, the SWP and YSA were deeply involved in a number of anti-racist struggles, including fights around affirmative action and the battle to desegregate the Boston schools, as well as the campus movement against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Montauk had a deep appreciation of the revolutionary significance of the fight of the Black nationality in U.S. politics, Hart explained. He organized working people in public housing projects and fought police brutality in Oakland, joining with others in 1947 to win the shutdown of the West Oakland Lock-up, a jail known for police violence against Blacks.
As a member of the Detroit branch of the SWP, Montauk was part of the campaign in 1955-56 to raise funds for cars for use by Black civil rights fighters in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott.
Over the last few years, Paul staffed the Pathfinder Bookstore in San Francisco every Saturday, Hart said. He did so as the reliable, professional cadre he had become. He would be there promptly, and used his time there well to show anyone who came in to the books and articles in the Militant that would help them understand their political questions.
Proletarian habits and attitudes
Jack Barnes pointed to the example Paul Montauk set for
revolutionary fighters. Montauk sought to promote through
everything he did the proletarian habits, attitudes, values
identified with the revolutionary, self-sacrificing cadres who
had led the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes and the SWP in the
1930s. He knew that the party consisted of numerous
generations, who worked together at politics. Young people had
enormous energy, Barnes explained, but they could not be
recruited to communism without an organization spanning many
political generations. Montauk reached out especially to the
young people coming around the SWP and the youth organizations
associated with it, to work with them, discuss politics, and
seek to demonstrate through his own example what it meant to
become a cadre of the revolutionary movement.
Montauk explained tirelessly that character traits have a class character. Even after a devastating economic collapse or war, the blind laws of capitalism will recreate the same setup again without any conscious effort. The working class cannot win with the character traits of the bourgeoisie, Barnes said. There are proletarian values and habits, that must be consciously learned, created, and put into practice in the struggle if capitalist society is not to undermine the working class by its daily operation.
Barnes pointed to the letter that Andrea Morrell, a rail worker in Boston, sent to the meeting. "Paul's example as a worker-Bolshevik who really put the party first, especially in difficult things or things we are taught are difficult, like money," she wrote.
Paul remained firmly convinced, Barnes explained, that the human material that made up the party consisted of ordinary, common people who made an effort, who worked at becoming revolutionary cadres. There are no special individuals who are born to the task. Individuals decide to be political and work at it, often, as Montauk himself experienced, in the face of tremendous pressure to retreat.
In a political debate or discussion, Montauk sought to provide the books and materials to allow for common study of the questions involved. He was a "gatherer," Barnes said, gathering in one place the historical experience on a given topic. The scope of this work is significant. In the late 1970s, serving in the party's national education department, he helped collect material for numerous "Education for Socialists" booklets containing reprints of important political documents and writings on political questions.
Although Paul and most others of his generation did not go into industrial plants when the party turned to the new openings to carry out revolutionary work in the trade unions at the end of the 1970s, this turn to the industrial working class was an effort of the whole party. Montauk joined with others in reconquering and advancing the Marxist approach to a whole range of political questions posed to the party at the time: the workers and farmers government; the course of the Cuban Revolution; women and the revolutionary movement; the social weight of the Black struggle; the writings of Lenin, and much more. Much of the party's accumulated knowledge and experience was not lost due to Montauk and others like him.
The meeting closed with a presentation by Dave Prince, who explained that Pathfinder Press is seeking to acquire advanced computer-to-plate equipment that will drastically lower the labor time required to publish the attractive, professional books and pamphlets working people need today. He urged people to contribute to a Capital Fund of $550,000, which would enable this equipment to be purchased and previous debts be repaid. Contributions were made at the meeting of $7,200. Nearly $70,000 more toward the down payment on the equipment was raised on the West Coast before and after the meeting.
Jim Altenberg is a member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers.