As for the “classic” type of sects still operating: these presently divide more or less into those that stem from the Trotskyist sect tradition and those that exemplify the social-democratic pattern. (To be sure, the Trotskyist grouplets shade off at one end into the neo-Stalinist type, particularly the larger sect called the Socialist Workers “Party”, whose politics has steadily moved since Trotsky’s death in the direction of Stalinization.)
What characterizes the classic sect was best defined by Marx himself: it counterposes its sect criterion of programmatic points against the real movement of the workers in the class struggle, which may not measure up to its high demands. The touchstone of support (the “point d’honneur,” in Marx’s words) is conformity with the sect’s current shibboleths – whatever they may be, including programmatic points good in themselves. The approach pointed by Marx was different: without giving up or concealing one’s own programmatic politics in the slightest degree, the real Marxist looks to the lines of struggle calculated to move decisive sectors of the class into action – into movement against the established powers of the system (state and bourgeoisie and their agents, including their labor lieutenants inside the workers’ movement). And for Marx, it is this reality of social (class) collision which will work to elevate the class’s consciousness to the level of the socialist movement’s program.
To move a fighting sector of the class into action against the established powers by only a step is more important than “a thousand programs,” Marx and Engels used to reiterate, and there’s no use denouncing them for deprecating programmatic politics. To the sect mind, their approach is utterly incomprehensible. For over a century now, we have seen the two touchstone; and the difference is as glaring nowadays as it ever was. The most important test has always been the relationship of the self-styled Marxist and the working class organized on the elementary economic level, i.e., the trade-union movement. (The test is all the more decisive in the United States where, unfortunately, the trade-union movement is the only class movement of the workers in existence.)
The sect-socialist has always felt a soul-torn difficulty in the face of a trade-union movement which rejects socialism; and the dominance of sect life in the history of socialism has been accompanied by the predominance of a leftist hostility to trade-unionism as such.
Marx and Engels constituted the first socialist school to hold a position supporting trade-unionism as such (while critical of given policies, leaders, etc., of course). And after their time, socialist history divides mainly between the social-democratic types who supported reformist trade-unionism precisely because they were themselves reformist rather than Marxist, and the would-be revolutionary socialists who found “revolutionary” arguments for returning to the old crap of socialist anti-trade-unionism – with the addition of Marxistical rhetoric to dress up their sectist approach. Very few so-called or self-styled Marxists have understood the heart of Marx’s approach to proletarian socialism: The basic strategy for building a socialist movement lies in fusing two movements – the class movement for this-or-that step which gets a decisive sector of the class into collision with the established powers of state and bourgeoisie, a collision on whatever scale possible; and the work of permeating this class movement with educational propaganda for social revolution, which integrates the two.
If this has been true in the best days of the Marxist movement to a greater or lesser extent, it took grotesque forms in the recent past of the American left, i.e., during the Sixties when the radical impulse was temporarily coming from non-worker sectors (students and some blacks not rooted in working-class life, for example). [3*] The student New Left commonly swallowed the image of Labor dished out by the sociological brainwashers of the academy: “Big Labor” alongside Big Business etc., identification of trade-unionism with George Meany or Hoffa, implicit equation of the trade-union movement with its bureaucracy, organized workers as an ipso-facto “middle class” stratum and part of the Establishment, and the rest of the ideological garbage from the real Establishment’s anti-working-class mind mills.
Even among those New Left elements – the better ones – who oriented toward going to work in factories or plants (“going to the people”), the dominant conception was that trade unions as such had to be replaced with more “radical” formations of shop organization which would somehow be outside the trade-union structure without being a dual trade union. These conceptions either remained in the realm of fantasy while making it impossible for their holders to integrate themselves into the real movement as trade-union militants, or (worse) were acted out destructively in certain places, bringing harm to the workers and discreditment to the radicals. Nowhere did the New Left impulse into the factories eventuate in a more or less well-rooted movement of militants inside the trade-union movement that could really offer opposition to the established bureaucracy: this is its indictment.
The sectist approach to the class movement showed its pointed ears in many ways that need illustration. Here are two.
The student radical, heart filled with sympathy for poor workers, turns to the Farm Workers’ struggle as one clearly meriting his support. Typically he does not “go to the people” by going to work in the fields like other workers; for should his special talents be buried under a clod? He goes to work “for the union”, i.e., as what the union calls a student volunteer. Impressed by his own self-sacrifice on the one hand, on the other he finds that the Farm Workers union scarcely measures up to his ideal of what the class struggle should look like. Pretty soon he complains that the student volunteers “have no say” in policy, i.e., he demands that powers of decision be partly shifted out of the union members’ hands and into those of the alien-class visitors who have deigned to donate their time. Or, finding that the internal life and democracy of the union are far from satisfactory, he may decide that the Farm Workers do not really deserve his support. He would bestow his saving presence only on certified-pure class struggles taking place on a different planetary plane.
The trade-union movement was very behindhand in producing opposition to the Vietnam war, as is well known, while antiwar feeling grew around the campuses. In student circles, the programmatic touchstone for complete opposition to the war came to be the slogan of unilateral withdrawal, which was richly justified. But finally, here and there pockets of antiwar opposition in the trade-union movement did start developing. Eventually a number of the more socially conscious and progressive labor leaders did screw up courage and founded the Labor Assembly for Peace in the teeth of violent denunciations by the Meany bureaucracy. These beginnings were timid in many respects, and, among other hesitancies, stated opposition to the war without specifying the slogan of unilateral withdrawal. We know of no more flagrant example of the sect mentality than the scornful attitude taken by New-Leftists toward this beginning of an organized anti-war opposition in the labor movement. Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, which had the most militant and most wide-open branch of the Labor Assembly for Peace and where leaders of the group if not the group itself openly spoke out for unilateral withdrawal, not one single New-Leftist eligible could be persuaded to taint his soul by having anything to do with a group so backward as to fall short of the unilateral-withdrawal program. The fact that this development represented the first steps of a responsible sector of the trade unions moving into collision with the established powers – this fact meant nothing to the sectists. The only consideration they understood was their soul-saving shibboleth, which they counterposed to the real initiation of class motion.
