Printed below is an excerpt from The Lesser Evil?: Debates on the Democratic Party and Independent Working-Class Politics. The book is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for July. The item quoted is from a presentation by Jack Barnes, currently the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, at a conference on political action held Oct. 30, 1965, in New York City. At the time Barnes was the national chairman of the Young Socialist Alliance. Copyright © 1977 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

BY JACK BARNES  
The term independent political action, unfortunately, almost like the term peace, is very abstract and very algebraic. You know, just think of the word peace for a moment. Lyndon Johnson is for peace; everyone is for peace. In fact, the more they slug it out the more they are for peace. In some ways, the term independent political action is almost the same.

Walk up to almost anyone on the street and ask, "Do you want to be independent politically or dependent politically?" They’ll say, "Independent." To put any meaning, any concrete meaning in the formula independent political action, we have to go back to the basic question I discussed earlier, the class character of the party. The Democratic Party carries out the policies and the needs of the American capitalist class; this defines its basic character.

If we are going to talk about independent political action, we have to begin to define it as independent of this party and the class it serves. In other words, stop talking about independent political action and start talking about independent working-class political action, or independent socialist political action.

This is important because the entire question cannot be separated from the electoral arena, as I’ve shown. The major fallacy is that there is a way to outsmart and outwit the Democratic Party. These people say they are not really coalitionists but it’s a tactical question whether they are in or out. But it always ends up the same way. At the same time, the question is certainly not isolated to the electoral arena.

This is another common fallacy: When revolutionary Marxists put forth the concept of independent political action, they are merely talking about their own election campaigns every couple of years. That’s totally false. For revolutionists, education, propaganda, and agitation for working-class political action, for a labor party, for a socialist party, for a break with capitalist politics is part and parcel of the struggle against the Meanys and Reuthers, the Rustins and Kings, the Thomases, the Harringtons, the anonymous editorial writers of the Worker.

The mere algebraic call for some form of independent political action still leaves the door open back to coalitionism. There are many examples of this. The easiest way to put it is: The call and the demand and the insistence on independent labor political action, and independent socialist political action, are part and parcel of the struggle against the leaders and privileged layers of the working class, the trade union movement, the civil rights organizations, whose very existence is tied up with the maintenance of this coalition and the maintenance of dependence. And they will go an awful long way to salvage this when they have to.

One of the best examples of this was the American Labor Party in New York. I don’t have time to go into it in detail. But when the Social Democratic fakers in New York were faced with the problem that a lot of their workers still hadn’t become "sophisticated" enough to understand they were supposed to vote for capitalist politicians in 1936, they formed a labor party, the American Labor Party. That’s independent political action, isn’t it? It had one small twist--it voted for Roosevelt. In other words, there’s more than one way to prevent the establishment of real independent politics. There have been many other examples in the so-called reform movements. The Progressive Party in 1948 is a very educational example of this. But that’s a topic for later on.

Thus these forms of so-called independent politics--the American Labor Party forms, the forms of uniting with the existing leaderships of these movements for a "socialist" program--are steps right back to coalitionism through the back door. And what this does is to bring us back to where we started. That is, to the antiwar activists, to these new radicals whose actions have thrown this question once again to the fore in the last few months.

I don’t call them the New Left or a New Left. Because they are not this. This is one of the misused and abused terms. What they actually are and what we actually see in front of us is a new layer of radicals. A small but significant and growing radicalization in American society. A layer whose political physiognomy is not yet determined in any significant way. What is important about their current activity--other than the fact that it is a protest which is almost unique in American society: against a war while that war is still going on--is the fact that their demand to bring the troops home is a confrontation with Johnson and with this entire layer of coalitionists, and that threatens the coalition. Their mere existence and their mere refusal to compromise threatens this coalition. This explains not only the attacks they receive from the press and from the government, but the vicious and now unanimous attacks that the leaders of American labor have come out with against antiwar demonstrators.

Their problem is not a rejection or an acceptance of an Old Left--again an imaginary, false, homogeneous concept--but understanding how to reject the reform-pressure-coalition perspective that the Communist and Socialist parties developed to a fine art from the thirties on, in place of a program of revolutionary opposition to the Democratic Party and its allies. That is, the program that the revolutionary socialists fought for in the 1930s, in the 1940s, in the 1950s, and that we still fight for today.

What they don’t need is an American Labor Party, Progressive Party, Community Party, Peace Party back-door path back to coalitionism. But education and organization for socialism to understand the need for class independence and for no compromises with the defenders of coalition. In other words, we need to win, recruit, and train out of this layer not more Reuthers but more revolutionists.

It is very important that this layer of young radicals understand that first and foremost what determines the character of any organization’s politics, what’s most basic of all, is the program. There is no shortcut, there is no easy way around establishing a set of principles and a set of demands and an approach, and there is no way around the fact that these will be in the interests of one layer of society--one class--or another. They must recognize what they must be after, that is, the abolition of capitalism, for it doesn’t make much difference how big a party or how big a constituency they form, it’ll have the same results. I’m always struck by this fallacy, the big number fallacy. The idea that, in essence, first you draw together the people and then later you tell them what the program really is, or later they discover what the program really is. I think we have had our best example of the horrendous effect that such an approach can have in Indonesia the last couple of months.

Here was an organization, the Indonesian Communist Party, that claimed three million members; three million members in its youth group; and a following of over twenty million in the mass organizations of the workers, peasants, women, students, and government employees that it led. And it is currently undergoing an utter annihilation at the hands of an army of about 350,000. The problem of the Indonesian Communist Party is not its constituency. It’s hard to imagine a much bigger constituency for any radical party, as a percentage of the toiling population. The problem is, you can’t turn a sponge into a sword overnight, no matter how large the sponge is.  
 
 
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