Thanksgiving with ex-Trotskyists

I celebrated Thanksgiving Day with Jon and Nancy and their two young sons in Troy, New York, a hard-scrabble, mid- sized city near Albany, the state capital. I had not seen him since the mid-seventies when we were both members of the Socialist Workers Party. He and Nancy, whom I had never met, had dropped out of the SWP, as had I. We spent the day trying to piece together what had happened to the party and ourselves. We also talked about what prospects socialism now had.

Troy is an old mill-town whose desolate red-brick nineteenth century textile mills and tenements evoked Edward Hopper paintings. There were no people on the downtown streets except for the occasional, solitary, silver- haired shopper. Troy, as most of the cities clustered around the Hudson River, thrived in the early part of the century. As the mills moved south, these cities aged and decayed.

Troy still had a raffish charm. Director Martin Scorsese used the downtown as a backdrop for his film "Age of Innocence". Scorsese found few changes necessary to have Troy stand in for the New York of the 1890's. His film crew put some antique signs up on Troy's downtown store-fronts and this satisfied the usually demanding director. The City Council left the signs up on the streets where the filming took place as a tourist attraction.

Jon had tracked me down through the Internet where I had become some sort of personality for better or worse. Not only was I getting e-mail from long-lost friends and comrades, I was also getting the occasional anonymous flame from places as remote as the Cybercafe, a hashish bar in Amsterdam with Internet connections. Someone stoned on hash once sent me a message, "Have a lousy day, you shitty clown."

I met Jon in 1971. He had just graduated from the University of Vermont and arrived at the Boston branch where I functioned as educational director. The Vietnam War had radicalized him and he spent his senior year devouring huge quantities of Marx. He had also become a cultural rebel. He galivanted around campus in cape and sword. The avant-garde theater inspired this get-up more than guerrilla warfare.

I accepted Jon with open arms since I had traveled through bohemia myself in the mid 1960's, dabbling in Beat poetry, Zen Buddhism and Existentialism.

The powerful student and women's liberation movements of the early '70s swept up the Boston branch and tossed it about like a leaf in a hurricane. Of the forty or so women in the branch, more than half had declared in favor of lesbianism including my girl-friend. This was fine with most of the men in the branch, including me, because it seemed revolutionary at the time. Jon, five lesbians, including my ex-girlfriend, and I traveled to the 1971 national conference of the party in a Volkswagen microbus. We decided to make a detour through Niagara Falls where we delighted in shocking honeymooners by flaunting our disregard for conventional dress and behavior. In the 1980's all of these lesbians, except my ex-girlfriend, returned to monogamous heterosexuality and became mothers. As Heraclitus once said, nothing is permanent but change.

Jon was a librarian but, complying with the party's "turn," went into industry in the late 1970's. He never turned back. He was a bus-driver, then a machinist, and now worked as a diesel mechanic in the Conrail repair shop in Albany. Nancy was an electrician with Mohawk power and lighting company. Lifting heavy equipment had added bulk to Jon's frame. His short-hair, mustache and beer belly made him indistinguishable from any Con Edison or NY Telephone company men you could see on the streets of New York. Jon did not affect this "proletarian" look. This was no collegiate cape and sword. It was the real thing.

Appearances, I learned, were not always reliable. Jon told me that one of his co-workers had never been to college, but was a big fan of "minimalist" short-story writer Raymond Carver and the Emerson String Quartet. The worker was trying to drag Jon to a concert in Albany to hear them play. Jon spent most evenings nowadays watching Seinfeld or surfing the Internet, and confided to me that he was less than enthusiastic about concerts nowadays. The job and the kids left him exhausted.

Jon and Nancy lived in a pleasant, two-story house with porch in a working-class neighborhood. The living-room had a "lived in" look. I was glad to see no African National Congress or Cuban posters on the walls. Clenched fists might spoil my appetite for turkey.

As the turkey sat baking in the oven, we sat and talked about old times while Jon occasionally tossed another log into the fireplace. His dog, a good-natured mutt, was flopped out in front of the fire while their two cats chased each other from room to room. His two sons popped into the living-room every hour or so to check out the adults. The six-year old could not find it within himself to walk between one location and another. He either skipped, hopped or ran at a break-neck pace. He accompanied each step with ear- splitting shouts of "hey-hey-hey" or "powee-zowee".

Jon and I went about our discussions while the kids intervened after a fashion.

I would be saying something in the vein of, "So what Lenin was trying to do with Iskra...."

Jon would break in, "Darryl, don't crack the nutshells on the carpet. (I'm sorry, Louis, just keep going.) Reece, you won't have any appetite for dinner if you keep eating that candy."

Was I cut out for fatherhood, I wondered? Probably not.

When dinner was ready, we sat down and stuffed ourselves. I had become a vegetarian and after we returned to the living-room to continue our discussions, indigestion attacked me mercilessly. My stomach went on general strike against the occupying army of turkey and mashed potatoes. I promised myself if I ever attended a thanksgiving dinner again, I would insist on tofu.

Jon and Nancy were members of the Albany branch that the SWP dissolved in the mid-1980's. They had just moved into the house when the national office of the SWP decided to transfer people out of Albany. It wanted to dispatch these troops and others to new sites in the mid-west. It was the aftermath of the ill-fated P-9 meatpackers strike in Iowa and the SWP leadership wanted to go where the "action" was. The party leaders themselves, who had never seen the inside of a factory or office, were always trying to pick out the place on the map where the "opportunities" were most favorable. This approach had turned a self-confident group of 2000 into a shell-shocked cult of 400 hard-core survivors.

Jon and Nancy, with their two kids and a new house, were simply not ready to drop everything and leave town. They turned in their resignation. Jon considered himself sympathetic to the party while Nancy shared my view that it was a hopeless sect. I looked forward to her participation in our fireside chat.

Jon was not entirely happy with what had become of the party, however. He believed that a mass-based labor party was necessary and wanted to work with something called "Labor Party Advocates", a formation of trade unionists around the country initiated by long-time Machinist's Union leader Tony Mazzochi. Mazzochi had been arguing for years that both the Democrats and Republicans were parties of the bosses and that workers needed a party based on the unions to fight them politically.

Jon thought this was a good idea but received no encouragement from the SWP. Even though he was no longer a member, he felt compelled to follow the lead of the Militant, the party newspaper. It warned that the Labor Party Advocates had a secret agenda to pressure the Democrats from the left rather than taking on the capitalist system itself. Such ultraleftism troubled Jon. After all, he argued, there is never any mass movement that does not to some degree embrace reformist illusions.

We had both been around when Democratic Party loyalists had formed the Vietnam Moratorium in order to channel antiwar sentiment into support for Democratic Party dove politicians like Eugene McCarthy. We did not allow the Vietnam Moratorium to take this path unchallenged, however. The SWP participated in the Moratorium and pushed it to the left. The successful Moratorium demonstrations of 1971 were factors that helped to persuade the United States ruling class that the war in Vietnam faced insurmountable domestic opposition.

Why would the SWP turn its back on something like an incipient Labor Party today, he wondered?

The answer was simple in my view. The SWP had degenerated into an ultraleft sect that was indistinguishable from the Spartacist League. No mass movement was pure enough for them. They were content to sit on the sidelines and wag their fingers at every "petty-bourgeois" movement that passed it by.

He tended to agree with me, but thought that the party would wake up when a new radicalization emerged. The pressure of events would rectify the wayward vanguard. I argued that the SWP had been sectarian at birth and was simply existing in its most normal state currently.

Nancy then stepped in. Jon was uncomfortable with cutting old ties according to her. He did not want to criticize the party because this would be too much like blasphemy. I discovered from her that Jon's family had belonged to the Pentacostal Church in Vermont and went to services four times a week when he was a kid. He was speaking in tongues when he was ten years old.

His father was a religious zealot who started with Pentecostal Christianity and then had moved on to Episcopalianism. He left Episcopalianism in disgust when they began to liberalize the service. He was now receiving catechism in the Catholic Church in his eighties. This man was always looking for the pure faith and hated apostasy. Don't ever argue theology with him, Nancy warned, he's more stubborn than a Trotskyist.

Not only did Jon retain the ties of an old worshipper to the party, his closest political co-thinker in the area had remained an at-large member of the party. Jon had no desire to fight with this factory worker named Larry, who was as stubborn in his dedication to SWP orthodoxy as Jon's father was to whatever church he belonged to at the time. Larry was as ultraleft as they came. Someone described him in the following manner. If he was a in box-car filled with people on their way to a concentration-camp, Larry would argue that things are actually looking favorable! Why would the capitalists resort to such desperate measures unless they were afraid of the working-class movement?

Nancy and I continued to hammer away at Jon, while he sank deeper and deeper into his overstuffed recliner. We could only hope that a rising mass movement would shake him out of his thralldom to a decaying sect.

That was the note I left on. All three of us believed that vast changes were brewing in the American working-class. Nancy believed that the members of her union hated Democrat and Republican alike and would flock to a Labor Party. Jon thought that railroad workers were extremely pissed off and many would follow his lead if he became a Labor Party activist. While bourgeois society and sectarian mistakes had battered each of us in our own way, we were not ready to accommodate ourselves to American capitalism. We promised to stay in touch.

I took the train back to New York and awoke from a nap midway between Albany and the city. I saw a Great Snowy Egret lifting itself into the air from a marsh alongside the railroad tracks. I followed the bird as it veered into the sky over the Hudson and soared toward the Catskill Mountains. The sight of Egrets never failed to make me smile.