NACLA's East/West Struggle
The very apparent vulnerabilities of democratic socialism, combined with the secrecy induced by government surveillance, attracted one group of Naclistas to Leninist strategies and forms of...
...The Report triggered a massive dispute between NACLA East and NACLA West, the gradual departure of DWP members from NACLA West and the closing, two years later, of the NACLA West office...
...What had been a reflexively anti-Communist U.S...
...We sat down to read it and thought 'Oh God!' We had never done that before...
...But we thought they were fundamentally missing it...
...policy and would give the group a new focus and renewed purpose...
...It was clear that people on the West Coast were joining the DWP," remembers Volk, "and it was clear that they wanted us to do more things in the interest of the party and it was clear that we really disagreed with what they were saying...
...The problem, she recalls, was not only the content of the issue, but the semi-secretive way it was put together: "There was never a notion that the two coasts had to agree on everything, but this was just beyond the pale...
...The very apparent vulnerabilities of democratic socialism, combined with the secrecy induced by government surveillance, attracted one group of Naclistas to Leninist strategies and forms of organization...
...Janet Shenk, now a staff member of the AFL-CIO, had joined NACLA East a year earlier...
...Nor, he remembers, did he want to "spend all my energy having to defend my views from this onslaught which I felt betrayed the bonds that had developed among people...
...Over the next decade, these struggles would become the crucial context for NACLA's analyses of U.S...
...By the mid 1970s, about half of the staff of NACLA's West Coast office had opted to place themselves under the "discipline" of a Californiabased Leninist vanguard party called the Democratic Workers Party (DWP...
...Consolidation discussions between East and West began taking place in 1976, and by 1978, at the annual meeting in New York, the Naclistas realized that it was not possible to maintain two offices...
...Klare, like many Naclistas over the years, felt that NACLA had fulfilled "a friendship and community function...
...Fred Goff remembers taking a walk with Steve Volk "in which we talked about the tension and how it was not clear whether it was going to be an amicable or an antagonistic split...
...What's more, this was just the time when the struggles of Central America were poised to enter the foreground of the left's political consciousness...
...the staff of both coasts was now listed on the masthead...
...If you could posit a party we actually supported and thought they were doing the right thing, would we have objected so strongly...
...Since one couldn't be a member of a "disciplined party," and a member of NACLA, DWP members left NACLA...
...Says Goff: "I think that NACLA emerged and survives today because it was not sucked into and totally assimilated" by the party-building debate...
...A NACLA West minority, including Klare, Farnsworth and Burbach, strongly opposed any connection between NACLA and the DWP, arguing that NACLA should remain a pluralist, nonaffiliated organization...
...Steven Volk was another member of the East Coast Collective who reacted strongly to the issue...
...we had all the copies...
...And Leninists and non-Leninists alike shared a recognition that ' LATIN A & EMPIRE BOSS & BI Managing Lab IiACLA Ireaders-notL Lt mention funding sources-were by no means ready to embrace a vanguard party, and that NACLA Reports had to continue to be made comprehensible to a broadbased, nonspecialist, politically nonsectarian readership...
...The division, even more than the MIR-UP disagreements on the East Coast, threatened to tear NACLA apart...
...foreign policy could not be changed without changing society as a whole...
...Probably not...
...We destroyed the old issues and printed a new report...
...When the West Coast office shipped finished copies of "Boss and Bureaucrat" east, remembers Volk, "we read them and said: 'Absolutely not...
...It was all the more damaging, remembers Volk, because this was a time when the anti-intervention movement was beginning to get support within the labor movement...
...Klare says he left because he did not want to be coerced into " a political cult...
...I told him I wanted it to be an amicable separation and that I would work to implement that...
...The departures set in motion a process that would eventually see the dismantling of NACLA West-but not of the organization...
...union movement was beginning to look at places like Argentina and Chile and see the savage repression of labor...
...labor movement, was a practice that betrayed workers by forcing them to submit to the discipline of capital...
...In addition, a joint resolution was agreed to by both coasts: "No staff, associate staff, promotion manager, business manager or other NACLA member...can belong to an outside disciplined organization...
...they would be a cohesive group of activists and organizers carrying out a unified party strategy...
...Further, there was a nagging suspicion even among the DWP adherents that one of NACLA's strengths was its nonexclusiveness, and that a staff member's acceptance of a political "discipline" would violate that understanding among the rest of NACLA's members and adherents...
...And to argue that progressive wings of the union movement were just as bad as the worst capitalist raider struck us as nuts...
...Unacceptable!' They had printed the whole run...
...Farnsworth, for example, says she had already begun to distance herself for various reasons, "including the ultraleftism," and left NACLA when she got pregnant in 1974...
...The conflict came to a head with the publication of an April 1977 Report called "Boss and Bureaucrat...
...People at NACLA East were reaching out for the labor contacts that would become strong within the next few years...
...It was initially assumed-in the East-West discussions of 1976 and 1977-that consolidation would take place in the West...
...Supporting revolutionary and anti-imperialist movements irom atar, it seemed, could not be as valuable as changing things from within the seat of the empire...
...In the end, notes Jon Frappier, a protagonist in these debates, "there was always a sense, on both coasts, that we could have our differences but that we should never allow those differences to split the organization...
...I think in a number of ways the West Coast office was stronger than the East Coast," says Goff, "in terms of the size of the staff, the fundraising it did, the building of the research library and the outreach...
...Indeed, the impressive research library and well-developed outreach tools stayed west and became the foundations of the DataCenter, the activist research organization established by Goffand of which he has been a guiding spirit for the past 25 years-upon the closing of NACLA West...
...I still think I should have been allowed to stay," one who wishes to remain anonymous says, "but we couldn't transform NACLA into something it wasn't...
...and the disclaimer, "the views expressed in this Report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of NACLA," was-and is still-printed on the masthead page...
...The capitalist "boss" and the labor "bureaucrat" were basically allies, pursuing their own interests at the expense of the working class...
...All articles were henceforth signed instead of assumed to be written collectively...
...The idea was to slowly build a revolutionary socialist party in the United States-a "vanguard" party under whose leadership the working class might gain "revolutionary consciousness," and under whose discipline its members could become more than a collection of individuals...
...We sent back our comments and they were obligated to make the changes...
...One of those Naclistas remembers being attracted to Leninism when working in Central America...
...There was a NACLA'S SMERICA REPORTS JREAUCRAT or's Discontent sort of protectiveness...
...We looked after each other's needs...
...And U.S...
...We became as pluralistic as possible while staying firmly on the left...
...The Report characterized reformist and mainstream labor leaders as "two wings of the same vulture," feeding on the bones of working people...
...Now there was a clique that operated secretely and tried to coerce the rest of us...
...While the rewritten report retained the (toned down) revolutionary politics of the DWP, the controversy produced three significant long-term changes in the magazine...
...Boss and Bureaucrat" was an extended argument that "contract unionism," the unionism of the U.S...
...that a decision to consolidate would mean that NACLA East would close its offices by the end of 1978, with NACLA West being obligated to take on all East Coast staff members who wanted to make the move...
...In that sense, he says, "there has always been a certain maturity...
...The "vulture" metaphor, more than anything else, led the East Coast to refuse to distribute the issue...
Vol. 36 • November 2002 • No. 3
