The life of Vince Copeland, a co-founder of Workers World Party, was celebrated in a memorial meeting in New York on June 20. The following is based on remarks by Sam Marcy, chairperson of Workers World Party.I've done practically nothing since Vince died but think about him, about Comrade Dottie [Dorothy Ballan] and about the Party. As much as I tried to write some notes for my talk, I said to myself, "Don't try to make a written talk. You've never done it before. It would sound stilted, not like you." I think Vinnie would not have liked it.
He would have liked me to make some political points, something helpful in the revolutionary resuscitation of Marxism.
Not only Vince but his family--Comrade Libby and Comrade Deirdre--and their friend Comrade Rosemary together constituted what I would call the revolutionary cultural elite of Buffalo, especially in the long years of reaction. They may not have thought of themselves that way, but that's what they were.
Buffalo had heavy industry, but it wasn't like Pittsburgh. It certainly wasn't like San Francisco. It had virtually no cultural elite, not even of a bourgeois character. Just the working class and the bourgeoisie. There were a myriad of religious and civil organizations but they were culturally weak even from a bourgeois point of view.
Legacy of the Enlightenment
Vinnie in my view represented the synthesis of Marxism that Engels refers to in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. Engels says that modern socialism develops from two tendencies, one being the French revolution and the Enlightenment period. It was led by great philosophers and thinkers. Although bourgeois, they were revolutionary for their age. There hasn't been anything like it in capitalist history since then.
Engels said that the modern socialist movement, to its great credit, is an extension of the ideals and theoretical and political tenets that the French revolution and the thinkers and philosophers who preceded it brought forth.
Vinnie falls very much in line with somebody like Voltaire. Voltaire attacked the aristocracy and feudalism. His writing was very witty, had a sense of humor, could make people laugh at the aristocracy and even at the bourgeoisie, although he himself was a bourgeois.
Reading Voltaire, you get a feeling of light-heartedness. Also with Cervantes, who wrote Don Quixote. It carries a certain humor and a feeling of cheerfulness and optimism, notwithstanding all the disasters that Don Quixote goes through with his horse.
A Marxist reading Don Quixote could not but notice that this was the first time a peasant was mentioned or talked about in literature. Cervantes was part of the Enlightenment, part of the great spirit it brought of hope and optimism. And Vinnie fully carried out that aspect of the Enlightenment. He didn't go around with a long face, always looking at the reactionary side, how things are bad, bad, bad. He could see the silver lining underneath, even in the worst situation.
Not only Vinnie, but his deceased wife Libby, and Rosemary, and 100 percent with Deirdre. There are many disasters in our lives, but if you want to see how not to let them get you down, you should look at them. They are very wonderful in that respect. They breathe the spirit of optimism and cheerfulness to the point of levity. I will give you one good example of how it worked.
A heavy task, a light heart
One day in Buffalo, I opened the mail and there was what appeared to be a notice from the landlord. "Because of the boisterous meetings you are having night and day, without letup, and your not paying attention to our request to at least lessen the noise, we are hereby notifying you that within three days you will be served with a summons and complaint and eviction notice. So please be ready, this is really a courtesy extended to you," etc., etc.
I didn't know what was going on. So I had a talk with Vince. I said, "You know, I'm going to be evicted." He said, "Oh, that thing. Pay no attention to it. That's Rosemary and Libby writing you an April Fool's day letter." Was I relieved.
That kind of levity helped in Buffalo. It helped because it diminished to some extent the harshness of the struggle and the viciousness of the witch hunt. I want to talk about the struggles that took place beginning with 1948. Our tendency had just been formed politically on the basis of a strong conviction and commitment to preserve the revolutionary essence of the struggle, in particular as it began to develop around the global class struggle. It was extremely difficult to build and maintain a revolutionary tendency given the international situation. We wouldn't have had such a difficult time if the witch hunt wasn't so great, but it's also true that the witch hunt made our tendency necessary.
At that time we had a strong fraction in Bell Aircraft, strong leadership in steel with Comrade Vinnie, and a relatively strong fraction in Westinghouse led by Comrade Dottie. We were a powerhouse. We were so deeply rooted in these great plants--Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna, Westinghouse in Cheektowaga, and the Bell Aircraft plant in Tonawanda. Any revolutionary would give a right arm to have that kind of influence. And we had it at the time.
But an evil wind was blowing that was strong and irresistible. You either had to bend with it or be taken in tow. If you could bend low enough for the wind to pass over, you might survive. But you could not survive if you frontally attacked it without understanding what this wind was all about, where it came from and what your position would be in the event you struggled.
Years of reaction
This big wind swept away the fractions. Our struggles were defensive in character. Even after all these years, it's impossible to reconstruct it in a way that would have brought victory. The social democrats who today are going over the history of that period, and in particular the Bell strike of 1948, leave out the whole international situation. And they leave out that we had such a strong fraction. To them we were disrupters.
It couldn't last because we all became known as "security risks." That was the problem.
For many years we thought about it. Vinnie once told me he many times dreamed of when he was back in the plant, back in the blast furnace. Dottie used to dream that she was going to pick up the young women in her car pool and take them to Westinghouse. Then I'd dream that I was back in the United Paper Workers Local 292.
It never came. We were security risks, a risk to imperialism, a risk to the bourgeoisie. We were among the early victims of the Cold War.
When Dottie and I were expelled from the Paper Workers, friends you knew who would shake your hand every time you came to the plant suddenly turned cold. It was the same everywhere, especially in Westinghouse. Vinnie wasn't iced out as completely because of the Black struggle at Bethlehem. It made the witch hunt not that significant. But the venality of the labor bureaucrats there made them most anxious to get him out.
Vinnie once told me of a Black worker who wanted to fight in the plant for Vince's reinstatement. Johnny was a young man, married, with two children, who had just bought a small new home. He said, Vinnie, I like you, you're the best, but all my life I've tried to stay out of jail. And now I've got two kids. If I fight for you, I'll be in jail.
Multiply that by the hundreds and you see why the difficulties were insurmountable.
We are fighting hard under present conditions to reconstruct the party in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for the bourgeoisie to get us out. This is what we've got to do.
That's why our party has to go through a period of reviewing Marxism in a comprehensive way, to retrain the leadership and the rank-and-file and prepare them for the struggles that will come later.
What happened to that sprawling complex of plants in Lackawanna? Where is it? The steel bosses said it was their life, they loved steel, they made and loved Lackawanna. Did a tornado or a flood wash it away? One day it was dead as a door nail. There was hardly any struggle because it was already known that the plant was going to shut down.
What happened to Westinghouse, at one time a new plant filled with young workers, men and women? Shut down. The same with Wickwire Steel.
This was the wreckage of the 1970s and 1980s. They tell us that the old proletariat is gone and a new work force is in order that's more amenable to management.
We have to answer them. First of all, we must reconstruct working-class anger.
Vince's writings on Hungary
In 1956, the Hungarian counter-revolution took everybody by surprise. The bourgeoisie called it a revolution and the other tendencies went along with it. But it was a counter-revolution. The fact that workers supported it doesn't change that fact. The workers have supported every imperialist war thus far. That doesn't change the materialist basis on which we characterize an event. We judge it by which class is leading it. Well, we lost some ground there. We had to go back to trying first of all to convince our own supporters. And Vinnie played such a very terrific role. He wrote a very wonderful piece on the Hungarian insurrection. Not that anything we said could change the situation. But from then on we learned that the revolutions are not there permanently. They have to be supported. And if conciliationism towards the imperialist bourgeoisie grows, there will be a counter-revolution.
Don't we know that if a militant group gets into a union and then shows themselves to be no different than the previous group, they'll be thrown out, too? That is why we are so careful in advising comrades who want to take trade union positions but do not fully understand the complexities of the union struggle as a reflection of the class struggle in general.
By the time the counter-revolutionary attempt in Tienanmen Square happened in China, our party was so fully prepared that it didn't merit more than two discussions.
We haven't turned our back on China, but the Chinese leadership have turned their backs on the anti-imperialist movement. They are doing all they can to introduce bourgeois reforms. And we are trying to assess them carefully.
China and the reforms
I might have been misunderstood in my last article. China is still a workers' state. But as Trotsky wrote about the USSR, it was a workers' state but with a whole list of conditions. And as you read the conditions more closely, it looked more and more dangerous.
You can't take it for granted that a workers' state can exist for an indefinite length of time without support from the proletariat in the imperialist countries, where there is so much economic and financial power and so much know-how. That support is so necessary and so indispensable to the working classes in the oppressed countries.
In the USSR, the bourgeois reforms have been reactionary in totality. They aim not to industrialize or to build but to dismantle, vandalize and destroy socialist industry. That's been the history from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to this present day. They haven't added one important complex to socialist industry.
What's the situation with China? In China, while the imperialists are taking hold in the coastal cities, they have not yet been permitted to go to the core of socialist property. Their influence is in the coastal cities, mainly in light industry. But it is very, very huge and could be very effective if it goes on and on. However, there is a progressive aspect. Several million poor peasants, mostly young and without land, have come to the coastal cities and become proletarians. That helps to build up a proletariat where it has been so meager.
When you've got a billion people, you need millions and millions of proletarians to uphold a workers' state. Otherwise the decollectivized peasantry, together with the bourgeoisie, will overwhelm it. But there are new workers coming in and they will learn. They will become more independent.
So we say China is a workers' state, but we are saying it conditionally. We defend it against imperialism and against the capitalist reforms. We will know soon enough if a counter-revolution is taking place. They will hang up pictures of Chiang Kai-shek, just as in the former USSR they are bringing back the pictures of the czar and the czarina. But hopefully it can be avoided.
Vince and the Party
Comrade Vinnie represented the best in socialist strategy and theory. His aim was to educate the workers in the spread of revolutionary Marxism and bring them to our Party. His contribution was to the Party. If he had been in the physical sciences, his contribution would go to humanity generally. But he was a revolutionary who had a chosen instrument to bring about the revolution, and it is our Party. We want to fortify it. We want to strengthen it.
We want to build new cadres, young Vincent Copelands who can make the Party the vanguard of the working class in the truest and the best sense. Long live Vincent Copeland's spirit! Long live the Party to which he gave the best of his life!