Including: A guide to Fred’s online writings
A video of a New York discussion held in memory of Fred Feldman is now available on You Tube. Thanks to Dayne Goodman for passing on the URL.
Fred Feldman in 1972. Photo by Walter Lippmann.
By John Riddell: Fred Feldman, a widely respected socialist activist and long-time leader of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, died August 25, 2018. An accomplished and influential writer, Fred had fallen silent in recent years due to ill health. Fortunately, most of his texts are online and easily accessible. A guide to his writings is provided below.
Fred was raised in Philadelphia. Back in the early sixties, as a student activist, he was often arrested during the Maryland Freedom Rides for Black human rights. In 1964, Fred supported the Socialists Workers Party (SWP) presidential campaign against L.B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater. He soon joined the SWP. He wrote voluminously for SWP publications, mostly on international issues, and served for many years as a full-time volunteer on the staff of its publications and of Intercontinental Press/Inprecor.
Fred reported on popular struggles in every corner of the world, often addressing the most difficult and controversial questions before the socialist movement. The Wikipedia entry on Fred records his path-breaking studies (with George Johnson) on the nature of the Communist Party of Vietnam, which presented the SWP position to the world socialist movement. Fred wrote a similar assessment of revolution and counterrevolution in Cambodia. In 1989 he and Georges Sayad wrote a short book on the Palestinian liberation struggle, which is still in print. (See references below.)
During the 1990s and after, Fred earned his living in industrial employment, carrying out socialist work among workmates and in his union; he now wrote rarely for the socialist press. In 1999, however, his critical spirit found expression in a contribution for the SWP’s internal pre-convention discussion, the party’s approved avenue for proposals for a change in the party’s course. Fred’s text suggested that the party increase its engagement with progressive united-front “coalitions” on class struggle issues.
As an example of this challenge, he cited the party’s relationship to defense of framed-up Black activist Mumia Abu-Jamal. “A rather broad spectrum of the party membership,” Fred wrote, were engaging with defense coalitions for Mumia despite “admonitions of the party leadership about the evils of the coalitions and the dangers of adaptation.” He referred to such rank-and-file efforts as “a kind of low-intensity guerrilla struggle” for a correction in course.
The party leadership interpreted Fred’s sardonic quip as enemy action – nothing less than a call for “guerrilla struggle” against the party itself. When the convention met a few days later, delegates were presented with a motion for Fred’s expulsion, which was duly adopted. Subsequently, all members were required to take part in a referendum vote approving this action. And there was more. The SWP leadership ostracized Fred, excluding him from all its public events and breaking off his human contact with party friends and supporters, that is, with the broad circle of friends made during 40 years of struggle.
In the years that followed, Fred experienced the deprivation and insecurity of the most oppressed layers of the working class, accepting this outcome with buoyant good humour. Gus Horowitz and other comrades who had left or been expelled from the SWP came to his aid. Still, the SWP as a movement should have done better. In this regard, Barry Sheppard, in the second volume of his memoirs (p. 307), recalls the words of long-time SWP central leader Farrell Dobbs:
How could we expect to ask comrades to make the sacrifice financially to work full time for the party for most of their active lives if, when they could no longer do so, we tossed them on the trash heap?[1]
The brutality of the party’s response tacitly acknowledged the issue’s importance. The SWP’s rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s was fueled above all by its effective participation in united-front struggles such as the anti-Vietnam war movement, Cuba defense, and struggles for Black human rights. Subsequently, its absence from such coalitions, particularly in the 1990s and after, crippled the party as a working-class leadership force. Fred was the first party member, to my knowledge, to pinpoint this danger.
Fred’s expulsion for speaking his mind in a leadership-organized discussion period was a blow against the socialist movement as a whole, a frightening vision of what SWP-style socialism might mean in practice. Still, it had a positive side-effect: Fred started to write again – at first, mostly for the discussion forum Marxmail.org. His pointed and insightful comments won a clandestine readership among many SWP supporters, including me. He also joined the U.S. socialist group Solidarity.
As a supporter of the Communist League (CL), the Canadian sister organization of the SWP, I was then barred from any contact with Fred. This barrier fell in 2003 as an indirect result of the U.S. war against Iraq.
Following the U.S. government’s occupation of Iraq that year, the SWP pulled back sharply from support of Iraqi resistance and of the anti-war movement in the U.S., on the excuse that the Iraqi masses lacked a progressive political leadership. Notably, the party dropped its long-standing advocacy of Iraqi self-determination – a clear violation of fundamental socialist principle. I joined with Vancouver-based socialist Roger Annis in challenging the SWP on this point in letters to the SWP paper, the Militant, and in forums of its Canadian sister organization, the Communist League. (See “The Iraq War and the Antiwar Movement”) This led quickly to our expulsion from the CL, along with other supporters who declined to endorse our exclusion.
Photo by Naomi Allen.
We immediately got in touch with Fred, and he joined us in founding a Web blog, Socialist Voice – based in Canada but with contributing editors in five other countries. An early issue featured Fred’s thoughts on resistance in Iraq (see below).
It was through the Socialist Voice partnership that I came to know Fred well. Although he now found writing for publication difficult, he contributed nine articles to Socialist Voice during the seven years that followed (see links listed below). Sensing Fred’s personal vulnerability, his friends in Canada tried to ease his personal burdens by arranging for a several weeks’ stay in Toronto for urgent dental treatment, raising thousands of dollars to meet the costs.
Fred was easy to like. He could be outspoken, stubborn, and sometimes abrupt, but that was far outweighed by his generosity, empathy, warmth, and affection. As a friend, he was loyal, perceptive, and profoundly helpful.
Fred’s writings have aged well and are still worth reading. As a sample, here is his analysis in 2004 of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq, excerpted below from Socialist Voice. Fred was seeking to correct a previous article that had compared the Iraq and Vietnamese freedom struggles in a simplistic manner. Fifteen years later, his comments on U.S. foreign-policy adventurism and the dynamics of popular anti-imperialist resistance apply well to the current world situation. (Full text available here.)
‘With the People of Iraq – Win Lose or Draw’
By Fred Feldman. Published in Socialist Voice, April 25, 2004 (excerpts)
In Iraq, it is imperialism that has shaken the status quo…. It is U.S. imperialism that has taken on the task of destroying the gains of the anticolonial revolution in Iraq and reshaping the country in their interests. This poses the question: Is imperialism strong enough, at home and abroad, to accomplish this overturn today.
If they are not, then the possibility exists of freeing Iraq from occupation and ending the attempt to reverse these gains before a leadership and movement of the caliber of Vietnam has been forged, and before a communist leadership exists, although through a mass struggle that advances toward this goal.
I don’t think imperialism is strong enough today, and I think that is part of the reason that Iraq is seen in some bourgeois quarters as something of a potentially ruinous adventure…. [C]arrying out a project of this scope requires much more stability and reaction on the home front, and much more and deeper defeats for the colonial struggles.
I believe there is a necessary and growing element of adventurism in U.S. foreign policy. They must seek to defy and change the relationship of forces in their favor, an element of what Hitler did in waging war against Russia and the United States and England at the same time. Not an exact parallel, but just because imperialist policies arise from necessity does not eliminate the element of adventurism.
[I]mperialism is weaker than it was at the time of Vietnam, less able to crush genuine popular struggles…. It is more possible, not more difficult to defeat U.S. imperialism today than it was in Vietnam.
A Fred Feldman bibliography
No listing exists of Fred Feldman’s many hundreds of published articles. However, the vast majority of his writings are available in searchable online resources and can be readily accessed at the following locations.
This outstanding 98-page study, co-authored with Georges Sayad, was published by Pathfinder in 1989. Pathfinder recently reprinted this work in a large-type edition, and it is still available from the publisher for $8 US.
2. Intercontinental Press
Fred wrote about 100 articles for Intercontinental Press/Inprecor between 1972 and 1985. A search at the Intercontinental Press archive produces a full list of Fred’s articles in a format that is itself searchable. Alternatively, enter Fred’s name plus a keyword.
3. The Militant
Close to 150 contributions to The Militant, written between the mid-1970s and 1997, can be retrieved at the Militant web site. A search can cover either a particular year or the entire span of the online Militant.
4. International Socialist Review Militant Supplement
Fifteen articles by Fred in the Militant’s International Socialist Review supplement can be accessed at the “New International” archive.
5. History of the Internationals
Fred’s 30-page essay “Stalinism and Internationalism (1935-1973) is found in The First Three Internationals: Their History and Lessons, co-authored with George Novack and Dave Frankel, published by Pathfinder Press and now out of print.
From 1974 to 1978, Fred headed a massive multi-volume project on international revolutionary organizing from the 1930s onward, entitled Toward a History of the Fourth International. See his introductory comments:
The publications of this project are available online, mixed in with some relevant contributions from non-SWP sources. See
6. Socialist Voice
The following nine articles by Fred were published in Socialist Voice between 2004 and 2010.
- With the People of Iraq — Win, Lose or Draw, April 25, 2004
- Venezuela, Najaf, and New York, September 3, 2004
- Bush’s Election Has Decided Nothing, November 8, 2004
- U.S.-ordered Iraq Vote Aims to Deepen Divisions, Spur Civil War, January 17, 2005
- Immigration Protests: An Inspiration for All U.S. Workers, May 21, 2006
- Is Cuba Done With Equality? — Not So! July 14, 2008
- Will U.S. Health Reforms Harm Working People? September 6, 2009
- Socialist Voice Readers Debate China, February 9, 2010
- China Challenges U.S. Hypocrisy on Human Rights, April 25, 2010
7. Marxmail
About of Fred’s 40 contributions to the Marxmail.org discussion list, contributed between 2002 and 2011, can be retrieved through a google search for the following string:
Fred Feldman site:lists.csbs.utah.edu/pipermail/Marxism
Note
[1]. Barry Sheppard, The Party: The Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988, vol. 2, Interregnum, Decline, and Collapse, London: Resistance Books.