Socialist Workers Party Sets
U.S. Election Campaign for 1968
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SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY PRESS CONFERENCE in New York, August 431, announced plans for 1968 election campaign. Fred Halstead (seated, facing cameras on the right) will be the presidential candidate and Paul Boutelle (seated, facing cameras on the left) will be the vice-presidential candidate.
Stokley Carmichael’s
Address to OLAS
(Complete Text)
New York, N. Y. 10010. HP eo
SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY LAUNCHES 1968 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
New York
AUGUST 31 -- The Socialist Workers party today outlined plans for its national campaign in 1968 at a press conference in the party headquarters.
Fred Halstead, the Socialist Workers party candidate for president and Paul Boutelle, the vice-presidential candidate, described a program focusing on bringing U.S. troops home from Vietnam and fighting for black control of black communities.
The growing interest in these issues was demonstrated by the unusually large press attendance. Four television networks, the major press services and a number of foreign newspapers covered the campaign announcement.
The TV coverage included two national networks, ABC and NBC, and two local New York channels, WOR and WNEW. The press services included AP, UPI, and AFP; and reporters were present from the New York Daily News, the New York Times and El Tiempo, a New York Spanish-language daily.
Jack Barnes, the national campaign manager, told reporters that the party intended to make this campaign the biggest one in its history. He stated that the party would attempt to get ballot status in twice the number of states as in previous campaigns.
(U.S. electoral laws are determined on a state-by-state basis. Not a few of the largest states, including California, Illinois and Ohio, have election laws which make it virtually impossible for minority parties to be on the ballots.)
Reporters pressed Paul Boutelle, an Afro-American known for his work in Harlem to build an independent black political party, to explain why he -was running on the slate of a socialist organization.
Boutelle stated that his campaign for a socialist program did not in way contradict his advocacy of black power. On the contrary, he saw the campaign as a way of publicizing and furthering the struggle for black power.
That struggle, he contended, is twofold. It is a struggle of blacks against white oppressors and also a struggle of black workers against capitalist bosses.
The reporters tried to get Halstead to say that the Socialist Workers party was exploiting the black power agitation. "No," he said, "we socialists have always supported the black power struggle."
The more hostile reporters tried to pin Boutelle down on the question of advocating violence.
"The entire history of the United States, from slavery to the Civil War to the sending of troops to the ghettos, shows that violence always comes from the white ruling class, not the other way around," the Afro-American candidate explained, and he cited abundant evidence to prove his point.
Fred Halstead, a cloth-cutter by trade, has been active in many unionorganizing drives. He participated in the GIs' "We Want to Go Home" movement following World War II, in the Far East.
' He is widely recognized as a leader in the New York and national antiwar movements which he helped organize from the beginning.
Paul Boutelle is a member of the New York taxi-drivers' union. He has been active in defending the seventeen black nationalists framed on trumped-up charges in Philadelphia and he recently chaired a meeting in support of the SNCC leader H. Rap Brown.
In 1965 he was the candidate of the all-black Freedom Now party in Harlem.
Boutelle announced plans to make a speaking tour of the black communities and campuses in the South during Septenmber and early October.
Halstead stated he intends to be active in the antiwar movement to build the most massive mobilization against the war in Washington, October 21. He will then fill speaking engagements from coast to coast.
In a statement issued at the press conference Halstead declared, "The only way to end the war is to bring the U.S. troops home immediately. That is what the American people want and that's what the troops want. As recent polls show, on this issue, we speak for more Americans than the Republican or Democratic parties.
The fact that the Socialist Workers party will be the only one expressing the sentiments of the majority of Americans on the war issue promises to make this campaign the most important in its history.
ISAAC DEUTSCHER
By Pierre Frank
Paris
Isaac Deutscher's death is a heavy loss for revolutionary Marxisn.
He was born 60 years ago in Chrzanow, near Cracow, in that part of Poland then incorporated into Austro-Hungary. He came from a highly orthodox Jewish environment. He repudiated his Talmudic molding, was won over by Marxism, and joined the Polish Communist party in 1926 at the age of 20. He soon became a "specialist" in Soviet problems within the party. As an opponent of the Stalinist "third period" policy which paralyzed the German proletariat confronted with the rise of Hitlerism, he participated in the formation of the Polish Trotskyist Opposition in 1932 and was expelled from the Communist party.
As a participant in the Trotskyist movement, he was against the formation of the Fourth International in 1938. After seeking refuge in London in 1939, he ceased functioning as a militant and thereafter devoted himself to journalism and to writing the works through which he became known to an ever-growing public.
His articles and essays on the Soviet Union had nothing in common -- is there any need to say so? -- with those of the official "Kremlinologists." The value of his writings, both in substance and style, came not only from his knowledge and talent; it is above all derived from the fact that the journalist and writer was deeply attached to Marxism as a method of thought and passionately dedicated to the international struggle of the masses for socialisn.
Thus he carried on the struggle as an unaffiliated combatant in a manner suited to his gifts. A certain nostalgia for the life of a militant was expressed in an essay he wrote on the Polish communist movement which continued to be of concern to him. On this account, among others, he felt the need to write a letter to Gomulka in defense of the young Polish revolutionaries, K. Modzelewski and J. Kuron, who were expelled from the party and given prison terms for having maintained their antibureaucratic communist positions. The defense of Vietnam against American imperialism also induced him to resume a certain kind of militant political activity. This was exemplified by his courageous intervention in the university "teach-ins" in the United States and by his participation in the War Crimes Tribunal initiated by Bertrand Russell.
The most important of his books, the one to which he devoted ten years of his life, is his biography of Leon Trotsky (the trilogy: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet ¢ Outcast). This biography is incontestably a masterpiece worthy of the great revolutionary to whom it was dedicated.
It is impossible in a few lines to give an appreciation of a work in which not only are the facts scrupulously set forth in contrast with the colossal lies and calumnies heaped up by Stalinism and the essence of Trotsky's theories and views presented in the clearest and most striking way, but in which Deutscher, who did not know Trotsky in his lifetime, was able to paint so lifelike a portrait of that many-sided and complex personality.
He was likewise able to delineate the equally rich personality of Natalia, Leon Trotsky's companion, with much sensitivity.
Those who will write about Trotsky in the future -- and there will undoubtedly be many such people -- may perhaps be able to add some new elements and make judgments different from Deutscher's, but they will have to take his trilogy as a point of departure.
We had intended to publish various articles about this biography in a special issue of Quatriéme Internationale written by members of the Trotskyist movement and other partisans of revolutionary Marxism in which a number of important questions posed by Deutscher's work would be discussed. He had promised to participate by replying to the criticisms that were brought forward. For reasons beyond our control there was a delay in carrying through this project. And we have not abandoned it. But now, unfortunately, it will remain incomplete.
Also regrettable is the fact that his death leaves unfinished the biography of Lenin upon which Deutscher spent the last few years. Since Lenin's life was much less colorful than Trotsky's, this biography would have largely been focused upon the formation and development of Lenin's ideas and in such a domain Deutscher would have made an outstanding contribution.
It is impossible for us to recall the memory of Isaac Deutscher without saying a few words about his disagreements with the Trotskyist movement, with the Fourth International. We are not thinking about those differences which can emerge
on the occasion of particular events; in fact, these were very slight in recent years. For example, we had very close agreement during the Middle East conflict. We refer rather to those divergences on important questions which sometimes provoked lively controversies -- without raising any obstacles to the existence of very friendly relations -- namely, those disagreements regarding the perspectives of the Soviet Union and the question of the Fourth International itself.
On the first issue, Isaac Deutscher counterposed the perspective of a quasigradual restoration of Soviet democracy to the necessity for a political revolution in the Soviet Union which is inscribed in our program. This difference became especially pronounced after Stalin's death. Though we both believed that Stalin's totalitarian and bloody methods had to be replaced by other methods of government, we did not attribute the same weight to the phenomenon of "de- Stalinization." In our opinion this process signified that the bureaucracy was making a defensive retreat. He reposed greater hopes in it and saw in it the justification for his perspective.
But Deutscher's thought was not static. He had already begun to place a question mark over this perspective in the third volume of Trotsky's biography. Without wishing to misinterpret his thought in any respect, we got the inression from all of his latest writings some of those pieces republished in Ironies of History and The Unfinished Revolution) that, in the light of the development of the Soviet Union over the past ten years and of the domestic and international policies of Khrushchev and his successors, our differences on this point were being reduced.
On the other hand, up to the very end he displayed an intractable obstinacy on the matter of the Fourth International. For years we had not been able to carry on any discussion, that is to say, a genuine dialogue on this question. This is not the place to dwell on this controversy in which we could not see any right on his side. Having said this, it is also necessary to add that his personality could not have easily unfolded its talents within the framework of an organization and very likely he was best able to serve the cause of the socialist revolution as a free-lance writer.
While deploring Deutscher's attitude, the Fourth International has to be faithful to its function which is to encourage and publicize every production of value for revolutionary Marxists, and Deutscher's activity occupies an eminent place in this domain. In particular, we cannot forget that it often served to introduce numerous young people to Trotskyist ideas which led to their political activity within the Trotskyist movement itself.
By continuing to popularize his writings in the future, we will not only: remain true to ourselves but we will help the memory of Isaac Deutscher continue to participate in the world struggle for the socialist revolution. :
We send the expression of our solidarity to his wife, Tamara, and his son, Mark, in the grievous ordeal they have experienced.
August 22, 1967