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Cowley PSF, 1982 FOR many readers, Karl Marx's Capital will seem, if not exactly a closed book, at least an extremely heavy one to open.

Yet as the main article on these pages indicates, the laws and contradictions of capitalism unmasked by Marx in this and other writings are of central importance to the workers' movement in its struggles in the 1980s.

In fact Capital is not as difficult a book as if often reckoned. And readers, can make a beginning with some of the shorter, more popularised pamphlets on the question.

Most obvious in this regard is the pamphlet by Engels entitled On Marx's 'Capital'. Included in this pamphlet are three reviews of the first volume of Capital which Engels wrote as part of an effort to publicise the content of this new, revolutionary analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism. These laws affect us all.

To live we all need access to certain basic commodities - food, clothing, housing and other services. But we can only obtain these in exchange for money.

Since none of the regular readers of Socialist Organiser are landed aristocrats or industrialists we must find that money by in turn selling something. And all that we have to sell is our ability to work, our labour power.

If we are lucky enough to find a job, we can sell our labour power in exchange for enough to keep us at a minimum standard from week to week.

But then our ability to work, transferred to a 40 (or 39) hour week in a factory is turned from a potential ability into actual, physical And it is labour which creates new value in finished commodities. The capitalist at the end of the week pays our wages - and keeps in his possession the fruits of our labour, which incorporate new value far in excess of the amount we take home.

Thus the formally equal exchange of labour power for 1 wages conceals an unequal relation between capital and labour.

While we walk out of the factory with a pay packet barely large enough for a week's groceries and necessities, and are forced to return the next week and following weeks in order to survive, the capitalist each week increases the surplus product extracted from our efforts. He then exchanges these products once again for money.

This goes under the heading of a "free exchange" between the labourer and the moner-owner. Yet as Engels poinis our:

That contract on the That contract part of the labourer is nor a of the labourer free contract. The daily time during which he is at liberty to sell his working power is the time during which he is compelled to sell it."

Engels also looks at the very different standpoint of capitalist the worker. While the worker sells his only commodity (labour power) in order to obtain money for the purchase of other commodities, the capitalist begins with money, and purchases commodities (raw materials, machinery and labour power) in order to increase his money.

Where there is no prospect of profit, the capitalist has no interest in production - no matter how vital the commodity concerned. The system is one of private gain and anarchy.

The increase in the wealth of the capitalist thus comes at the expense of the exploitation of the working class. And the effects this exploitation are by no means confirmed to the workers directly employed by the capitalist class.

Indeed Marx and Engeis point clearly to the need for the capitalists to utilise unemployment in order to hold down wages.

The hundreds of thousands of youth on cheap labour YOP schemes may well detect a prophesy of their plight in Engels' words:

"They form an industrial reserve army which during times of bad or moderate business is paid below the value of its labour and is irregularly employed or comes under the care of public Poor Law institutions, but which is indispensible to the capitalist class at times when business is especially lively ... and which under all circumstances serves to break the power of resistance of the regularly employed workers and to keep their wages down."

In pointing to the central element of exploitation embodied in the normally unquestioned everyday realities of the wages and the length of the working day. Marx and Engels expose for all to see the conflict of class interests that lies at the centre of capitalist society.

They show the necessity for the exploited majority of propertyless wage workers to rise up and take into their own hands the privately owned means of production Only a system of production to satisfy public need rather than private profr can bring an end to poverty and oppression.

It is the contribution of Marx and Engels to hare s thoroughly spelled ou: th contradictien within JoEalism which make si i revolutionar deserters both nesses sissie

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¡ordon, Oscar Coover, Sr., and Carl Skoglund chairman, Martin Abern, secretary] that were treat- writer, whatever was great crisis for the Trotskywas trying to get some ed as articles. needed. ist movement. by a guard strung out in to see these published in emergency conference of ing impotence of the Trotfront. the Militant, which had in a the Fourth International skyist movement lifted in held in 1940, and there- the later '30s, and in the "Hecklers, and one part- equaled reputation for jour- after administrative sècre- early '40s progress was icular heckler who seemed nalistic excellence in radic- tary of the International Ex- made. Then came great but to be leader of the CP al circles'' ecutive Committee of the perplexing historical events FI, based in New York. He like the Chinese Revolution break up the meeting, were ed produce the Militant. travelled as a seaman to - led by Stalinists and being handled by Max with During a particularly bad make contact with the Trot- setting up a totalitarian his usual verve. Shacht- period in the life of the skyist groups wherever Stalinist state. man eventually won the young, persecuted, poverty crowd around after rallies stricken movement, when In this capacity he came seemed consigned to the to Pritain in 1943 and hein- fontantoe of historv Organiser, Thursday LAST Friday Sam Gordon died in a London hospital, in his 72nd year. He had fought a 20 year battle with cancer before it finally killed him.

Sam Gordon's life, from early youth to old age, was a part of the Trotskyist movement, at times a central part. It traversed the entire long history of that movement.

He was secretary of the world Trotskyist movement during World War 2, when its centre had to be located in the USA. This was because of wartime repression which claimed the lives and the liberty of many Trotskyists all across Europe and in both of the warring camps.

He was an important leader of British Trotskyism in the *40s and '50s. In the '70s he was an important influence on the work Socialist Organiser did, offering moral support, advice and suggestions though we did not always take them, and in retrospect I can think of cases where it would have been better if we had).

Born

Sam was born in New York City in 1910. He joined the American section of the Trotskyist Left Opposition in 1929.

Led by James P Cannon and Max Shachtman, a small group of Marxists had broken with the American CP the year before. Trotsky had been decisively beaten in the factional struggle with the bureaucracy within the shell of the CP of the USSR, and spent 1928 in exile in Central Asia, before being expelled beyond the borders of the USSR in 1929.

The comrades who raised the banner of Trotskyism in the USA seemed to choose a lost cause, and certainly chose to be an ostracised and persecuted minority in the communist movement.

Criticisms

Writing in the mid '70s, Sam described how he came to Trotskyism. In a student club he was drawn towards communism, but also became aware of some of the Trotskyist criticisms of Kremlin policy.

•We searched for and got hold of Max Eastman's book 'Since Lenin Died' which first broke the full stood for. Together with some who were already in the YCL, I was discussing the import of this work when we heard... that James P Cannon was about to be expelled from the Communist Party for Trotskyism.

"It was in this atmosphere that several of us from the club went down to the Fourteenth Street Labor Temple, to one of the ≤-_¢ ahlin mostings of the Irst puvut meenugo vi VAIL Communist League, to see for ourselves.

"As we came in and took our seats there were several commotions in the hall. A rush for the platform [where Cannon and Shachtman were sealeu «uu wat masted and tha order] had been repulsed 'commando' assigned to l duguer war Icuureu of lorahter that poduced the Stalinists to silence.

"Cannon was the next and last speaker. He spoke quietly, in lecture style, in a ringing tenor voice, and his topic was internationalism and communism, how the two were inseparable, how the task that the Left Opposition had set itself was to re-establish this fact here and in the world movement.

"Jim's speech left powerful impression on me, and I believe I was won over to Trotskyism then and there. But the YCLers in the club were still working hard on us outsiders, and a few of us decided we should have a look at Europe, Germany in particular, and after seeing advanced class struggle in action, we would finally make up our minds.

'The way to do that was to catch a ship on a pierhead-jump for Germany, work our passage, and jump ship at the other end. For all this, contact with the CP was regarded as indispensable. It was not easy with growing maritime unemployment.

'We did just that, each in his own way. I got to Berlin and eventually found a inh that allowed me to do a JuN a lot of reading and study. ing and to participate in demonstrations, etc. It was there I made up my mind to join the Left Opposition. I contacted the Militant, and wrote several letters to Martin Ahern ithe artina "Naturally I was thrilled short timè : gained an unBack in the USA he helpisolation and personal conflicts led to the temporary withdrawal of Max Shachtman from editorial work, he served as editor of the Militant. He was less than 21 years old.

Responsibility

The spirit in which he undertook that great responsibility is the key to understanding how the organisation could survive such unfavourable conditions and develop.

'I had not yet turned 21 when I assumed my editorial duties on the Militant. No young man of that age could have undertaken such a responsibility on mere self-confidence. 1 was not particularly ambitious. If anything, the contrary. Dul i was me stu- Dust it was the solfconfidence inspired by the feeling that I was doing what was politically correct and necessary that kept me going.

In the '30s the American Trotskyist movement broke out of its initial isolation and went from strength to strength. In 1934 the Trotskyists made a major step forward when they fused their organisation with the American Workers' Party, which had essentially adopted their ideas. In 1936 they joined the Socialist Party as a faction, but were expelled in 1937.

Sam Gordon worked closely with James P Cannon. Sam was an organiser.

He was secretary of the American ships could go.

ed set up the collaboration between groupings. within the two main Trotskyist organisations - the RSL and the WIL (led by Ted Grant, Gerry Healy, and others) — that eventually resulted in the fusion of the two organisations into the Revolutionary Communist Party in summer 1944.

He was also a key influence pressing that organisation to abandon sectarianism and integrate itself in the mass political labour movement. This was a central theme of Sam's politics, as it was of Cannon's and Trotsky's. Trotskyists are not and cannot be a self-contained and self-sufficient group of people who must preserve themselves for exhibition in a historical showcase, in elemental purıty by the labour around them.

Fought

It they are to be or any use of the working class, they must know how to grapple with it, struggle within it constructively, learn from it, not be afraid of it. Sam and others fought for such an approach in the '40s and '50s.

He settled finally in Britain in 1952 when his English wife, Mildred, was witch-hunted out of the USA as a Trotskyist in the era of McCarthyism.

This was a period of movement The isolation and seemlo many Trotskyism Whole layers of the hitherto Trotskyist movement were thrown into crisis by these developments. A mood of conciliation to Stalinism developed: the overturns of capitalism and imperialism were seen as far more important than the fact that it was Stalinist bureaucrats who had led the anti-capitalist revolutions and that they had imposed totalitarian anti working class systems at the same time.

Though in certain circumstances the Stalinists had shown themselves capable of being consistently anti-capitalist (unlike in Spain, France, etc in the '30s). thev had not ceased to be simultaneously anti-working class.

Sections of the Trotskyist movement began to talk and act as if they had, and to abandon the Trotskyist programme or puuuudi revolution to overthrow the bureaucratic rulers in the Stalinist states.

Major political disorientation set in. World War 3 seemed a certainty. Some Trotskyists developed a black and white view or tne world as consisting of two blocks, with no meaningful alternative but to choose between them.

There was no role for independent working class politics in a world where In lace U1 successes Stalinism . in and after. ers of the world Trotskyist movement (Pablo, Mandel, etc) was that in World War 3 the Russian Army would rule over Europe and carry out the task of the socialist revolution there as part of an 'international class war' . At best independent working class politics would have a role at a later period of history.

Those who held to these views gave critical support tes tha Man ratimo in LU WIt LYLaU China, not advocating a working-class revolution there. They refused to side unequivocally with the Berlin workers' uprising against the Russian and German Stalinist bureaucrats in June 1953 - even though the 'Red' Army was slaughtering the Berlin workers, to call for its withdrawal, they argued, would thave been to risk letting the US Army in. International power block considerations had replaced class-struggle and working class considerations even to this extent.

Sam Gordon was one of the earliest Marxists to sound the alarm against the drift of the Trotskyist movement, led by secretary Michel Pablo, towards politically disarming itself fann of tha imnacino ATM Яттелтіп achieved by World War 2 Criticised He criticised the documents of the Third World Congress of the Trotskyist movement, held in 1951. Eventually, especially after the East Berlin workers' uprising, Cannon and othnan Inanchad a full-acale drive to purge the Trotskyist movement of what they called 'Pabloism' Sam Gordon later used to describe himself, with some justified pride, as 'the first anti-Pabloite'. (The documents and letters of the period, Sam Gordon's included, are available from the publishing house of the American SWP).

Sam Gordon was in semiretirement from the '60s perhaps preoccupied with his illness. He was bitterly hostile to the recrudescence of sectarianism in the '60s and '70s -breaking his decades-old links with the leadership of the Socialist Labour League (which mutated into the WRP). He followed the affairs of the labour movement very closely. He attended the last Labour Party conference, and appreciated very highly the qualities of the left leaders, especially Tony Benn.

He was to the end of his days a loyalist for the American Socialist Workers Party. He tried to view their political development in as sympathetic a light as possible, and to explain it to those of us who were harshly critical.

All the more significant, therefore, was his readiness to admit that when in the first six months of 1980 the segment of the USFI led by • the SWP welcomed the Russian invasion of Afghanistan as a case of 'going to the aid of the revolution' , in that instance they had departed from Trotskyism.

He encouraged at least one critic of those politics to write against this pernicious and reactionary nonsense. The 'first antiPabloite' had not entirely ceased to live in the 70 year old Sam Gordon.

Following the affairs of the Marxist movement, and occasionally intervening, Sam was completely free from narrow factionalism. He said he was 'elated' and 'enthused' by the fusion that took place in July 1981 between the International-Communist League and the old Workers' Socialist League to form the new Workers' Socialist League. It reminded him of the events in which he played a central part nearly 40 years earlier, leading to the creation of the RCP.

Loss

He saw it as perhaps the beginning of the end of the period of fragmentation and unravelling for the forces calling themselves Trotskyist.

What has to be said of the great pioneers of Trotskyism who survived Trotsky, like James P Cannon, must also be said of Sam Gordon: they leave many unresolved problems, some of them fundamental, to the present generation of Trotskyists. But it is thanks to the courage, dedication and unbreakable conviction of those like Sam Gordon that there now exists a Marxist movement at all, able to build on their work and to renew and politically develop itself in the coming class struggles.

Sam Gordon's death is a loss to the labour movement, and to us.

We send our condolences to his wife Mildred and their son.

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Socialist Organiser, Thursday 18 March. 1982 Page 1I

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