Remembering Sol Dollinger
posted
to www.marxmail.org on
(This was originally a submission to "Revolutionary History")
Sol Dollinger, who was one of the few surviving members of the "Cochranite" group that split with James P. Cannon's Socialist Workers Party in 1954, died on September 12th, a day after the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. This was perhaps an appropriate exit date for somebody whose personal life was so inextricably linked to the wars and economic crises of the twentieth century.
Sol was born on
By the time Sol was eighteen, he had joined the American Trotskyist movement on whose behalf he performed "Jimmy Higgins" work around the headquarters like folding the Socialist Appeal, putting address labels on the New International or cleaning Cannon's office. After Sylvia Caldwell had finished typing up one of Cannon's speeches, Sol often delivered them to his apartment where Cannon would rehearse them in front of the awe-struck youth. Cannon liked an audience.
Sol was encouraged to ship out in the merchant marines,
where the Trotskyists were organizing a fraction. He
found himself on the
Shortly before shipping out, Sol had begun a romance with Genora Johnson, who had recently split up with her husband
Kermit. The Johnsons were Socialist Party members who
had become key figures in the
After four thousand National Guardsmen had been mobilized to put down the strike at General Motors, a women's Emergency Brigade under Genora's leadership entered the battle. Four hundred women volunteered to beef up the picket lines and she saw to it that they were organized on a military basis. In Sol and Genora Dollinger's "Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the Auto Workers Union," she writes, "We carried clubs with handles carved to fit a woman's grip. Whenever you saw one of those women, you knew she was ready for action at any time, morning, night, or anytime."
By 1946, Sol had become an autoworker in
The first charge surfaced at the 1946 UAW convention, when party members supported fraction leader Bert Cochran's proposal to join the R.J. Thomas-George Addes caucus in opposition to Walter Reuther, a move that infuriated Cannon. Although the SWP had supported Reuther on the basis of his leadership role in the militant strikes of 1945, his nomination of Melvin Bishop for Vice President at the 1946 convention was unacceptable to Cochran, Dollinger and other militants. Melvin Bishop was not only a notorious red-baiter, there were strong suspicions that he was involved in the beatings of militants at the Briggs auto parts plant in 1945, where Genora worked. Masked assailants broke into the Dollinger apartment on October 16th that year and beat Genora brutally. She suffered a broken collarbone, a concussion and damage to facial nerves.
Motivating Bishop's nomination, Reuther took aim at "outside influences" in the union. Although this was presumably directed at the CPUSA, a Trotskyist delegate named Johnnie McGill demanded to know if this included Socialist Party activists and Trotskyists as well. Reuther said it did. From that point on, the Addes-Thomas caucus became a rallying point for the left, even though the discredited Communist Party was included. For militants like Cochran and Dollinger, the stakes were bigger. They sensed that the witch-hunt would soon be in full swing and understood that redbaiting must be repudiated.
With respect to the charge of "embourgeoisification," Sol Dollinger dismissed it by simply laying out the economic facts of his own life as an autoworker following the war. After first making his acquaintance on the Internet, I recounted this charge that I first heard in a class given by SWP leaders in 1969. He replied:
"Three decades later, I am amused by the explanations
made by Frank Lovell [SWP trade union leader] that you heard as a new member of
the SWP. He contended that the members of the auto faction had become embourgeoisified by high wages in the industry. My position
as a Chevrolet worker is not much different than other autoworker members of
the party. We rented in
The differences that first appeared in 1946 soon snowballed into other far-reaching theoretical and organizational questions that still have consequences for Marxist revolutionaries today. According to the official version of the fight, the Cochranites were simply looking for an excuse to retreat from politics. In the preface to "Speeches to the Party," Al Hansen (brother of Joseph Hansen) writes:
"During a visit I and Bea Hansen made to
To make a pro forma gesture toward historical accuracy, Hansen is forced to admit that the Cochranites did not retreat overnight to lives of comfort and political conformity. He writes, "After the split the Cochranites set up their own organization whose activity consisted almost solely of promoting the 'American Socialist,' the magazine they founded."
What Hansen fails to take into account was the deliberate decision by his opponents to avoid the organizational model embraced by James P. Cannon and his followers. The Cochranites formed the Socialist Union not as another "Marxist-Leninist" exercise to recruit new members one-by-one on the basis of a fully elaborated program linked in "revolutionary continuity" with Karl Marx. Instead, they saw it as a catalyst for regrouping the left around a common broad-based program that focused on American issues rather than establishing who was correct on the Stalin-Trotsky debate, etc. As such, they anticipated similar initiatives that would arise in the 1980s after the implosion of a number of "Marxist-Leninist" formations, including the Socialist Workers Party itself. Erwin Baur, a Cochranite veteran now in his eighties, continues to work with Solidarity, which he sees as a continuation of their experiment.
It was not as if the Cochranites were tired of revolutionary politics. Rather, they were tired of dead-end sectarian models. As Bert Cochran told his comrades at a founding meeting of the Socialist Union:
"We approach all these strata, however, in the spirit of Marx's Communist Manifesto which proclaimed that the revolutionists had no interests separate and apart from the working class, that we are not a special sect, cult, or church, which seeks to draw people out of the broad currents into its backwater, but rather as American Marxists, we seek to join with others in advancing the existing struggles to a higher stage and on a broader front. We are convinced that out of these struggles and experiences, even before big mass forces take to the field, Left currents will arise with which we shall be able to cooperate and fuse; that the American Marxist tendency, as a stronger formation than at present, will thus be able to discharge its role as a left wing in the big movement-as part and parcel of the struggle to create the mass revolutionary party in the United States. That is our perspective."
After Sol and Genora Dollinger were witch-hunted out of the auto industry, they
moved to
While the Socialist Union was marked by a kind of easy-going
tolerance, Sol himself could be fractious on occasions, particularly around
questions that he felt strongly about. He was bitterly opposed to black nationalism and appeared to retain the kind of class-over-race
orientation that marked the Trotskyist movement of the 1940s. This was
understandable. During the immediate post-WWII period, the
In the last ten years of his life, Sol battled prostate cancer. In a race to finish his book on the formation of the UAW, Sol was ultimately successful. Published by Monthly Review last year, it contains valuable lessons for trade union activists today. The last four chapters are an "oral history" of the period by Genora Dollinger, whose contribution to the movement was acknowledged in the documentary film "With Babies and Banners." Sol was immensely proud of this book and his association with the American Socialist/Socialist Union project.
After making Sol's acquaintance on the mailing list I moderate (www.marxmail.org), I made it a point to learn as much as I could about the "Cochranite" experiment since it seemed to address questions that the left continues to face today. This led to a scanning project of selected articles from the American Socialist that will make their appearance on the Marxist Internet Archives before long (www.marxists.org). Their continuing relevance will serve as apt tribute to the life and career of people like Sol Dollinger, Genora Dollinger, Bert Cochran, Harry Braverman and others.