Break-up 2

18.

In late 1976, 14 black Marines at Camp Pendleton near San Diego allegedly attacked a group of white Marines who were allegedly a part of the Ku Klux Klan. They were in the process of being railroaded into prison when the PLP began developing a campaign to free them. “Free the Camp Pendleton 14” became a major party initiative, and we did a creditable job of building a coalition with such rival groups as the National Lawyer’s Guild, the NAACP, and People’s Temple. We organized a sizable march in the town of Oceanside, on the coast between Los Angeles and San Diego where the base was located, bussing people in from the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

“Roots” made its television debut about this time. Our newspaper,Challenge, led an attack against it for preparing middle class, nationalistic blacks to be the new “Judenrat,” referring to the council of Jews who ruled such places as the Warsaw Ghetto. Many of us had a tough time stomaching this line. The word “Judenrat” itself sounded viciously anti-Semitic to me, though it was being put forth by Jews in the PLP leadership. It occurs to me now that people with a familiarity with Yiddish might hear the word differently.

I wrote a response to the review, declaring that the showing of “Roots” with its unstinting portrayal of slavery and resistance actually represented a reform of the media, but that the ruling class still determined the parameters of debate: militancy along black nationalist lines was now considered “safe” by the rulers because it represented no real threat, while militancy along multiracial class lines was still simply not discussed.

The Camp Pendleton 14 Coalition even managed to get the endorsement of “Roots” author Alex Haley, but that sort of breadth of the coalition was too much for the national leadership of the PLP, and they accused us of “uniting with the enemy.” They insisted that we disband the coalition. The west coast leaders, Hari and Jim D., refused, and were forthwith expelled from the party.

The Party chairman, Milt Rosen, flew out to San Francisco and there was a large meeting of the party and its friends. Our side defended its united front approach by reading from Lenin’s “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.” The other side attacked us for bringing a couple members of the Camp Pendleton 14 to the meeting, about which Milt said something like, “It’s a shame to use these ‘chaps’ this way,” which had our side calling him racist. Within a week, about 70 PLP members – about ¾ of the total membership in the Bay Area (probably about 15% of the national membership) – submitted letters of resignation.

So began another phase our lives. The split was heart-wrenching in some ways. Former friends were on the other side of the line. But it was enlightening, too. For the first time in a long time, I found it necessary to think for myself politically.

As happens in splits of this kind, some people dropped out of politics all together. But some of us kept meeting in a loose network of study groups. I think we called ourselves "the process." I was in a study group that actually read Das Kapital, and even understood some of it, enough so that when the leader stepped down, he asked me to lead it. I managed to do this through the first volume, even though the material was above my head. What I got from the book was a profound sense of how capitalism was completely disconnected from the commodities it produced, being focused only on the surplus value – profit – the commodity produced in the market. Meaning that this was an essential component of capitalism, that the entire endeavor of capitalism existed only to create surplus value. In other words, it ultimately couldn’t be reformed: trying to get capitalism to serve the needs of people was a futile exercise, though through continuous struggle, you could soften the blows of exploitation.

You could see this clearly in the crisis of 2008, in which we are still wallowing. In order for the entire system not to collapse, the banks and financial sector had to be bailed out before anything else. If Obama or whoever had failed to bail out Wall Street, I’m convinced that the US would have quickly descended to the level of Germany after World War I, and the capitalists would have been pretty much forced to find their Hitler in order to survive.

As in the 30s, the current depression-like conditions are precipitating a polarization between those forces who will fight to save capitalism at all costs, and those beginning to realize that for people to flourish once more, we need to build an alternative to capitalism.