Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Capital's Labor Lieutenants and Socialist Sergeants: The Danger Within" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 187-189). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist July - September 1997
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it."
—Chinese proverb
Radicals hear it constantly: Why don’t you all just stop bickering and get together? Well, I’ll tell you why. An omnipresent collection of leaders who refuse to lead are the obstacles to united fronts against reaction.
Here in Seattle lives a personage called Dan Savage, writer of a notorious sex advice column that catapulted him into a new career as a peculiar queer spokesperson. In the daily Seattle Times, he recently urged readers to oppose a state initiative to outlaw job discrimination against sexual minorities.
Such betrayal is typical for a species that Leon Trotsky designated as the middle caste. These are the opportunist power brokers in every movement who teeter on a seesaw between labor and management, between feminists and patriarchs, between people of color and the racist establishment, between gays and institutional homophobes, and like that.
When the going gets tough, these caution-purveyors search for compromise, for peaceful coexistence, for surrender. They are weary of being squeezed between the establishment and the disgruntled rank and file, on whom their livelihoods and status usually rest.
Trying to justify his astonishing stance, Savage whimpered that gays could lose the vote. Readers, alert! Middlecasters admonish that if we rock the boat, we’ll lose everything, including the support of the masses. But what they really fear is being knocked off their privileged but unstable perches into the churning waters of serious revolt. And to a career reformist, even a petty perk is worth the sacrifice of a slew of principles.
Trotsky could have been painting today’s global picture when he wrote in 1938:
“The economy, the state, the politics of the bourgeoisie and its international relations are completely blighted by a social crisis. . . In all countries the proletariat is wracked by a deep disquiet. The multimillioned masses again and again enter the road of revolution. But each time they are blocked by their own conservative bureaucratic machines.” (My italics.)
One of Trotsky’s case studies of this blight was the civil war in Spain. After the fall of the monarchy in 1931, rising fascism threatened the Spanish republic. To save the day and seize the state, the heroic Spanish workers needed guiding lights who would say go for it, who would explain that only socialism could resolve the crisis.
Instead, each of the workers’ parties in some way slammed the brakes on the struggle. The Stalinists of course were the most treacherous: They idiotically defined all other left formations as just as bad as fascism. Thus they tragically divided the workers and paved the highway for Franco’s iron heel.
Yet the fence-straddlers continue to try to placate capitalism, even when they hold state power and enjoy public favor after a revolution. And we see the results in disasters like the Sandinista defeat in Nicaragua, paralysis in South Africa, etc.
In the U.S., the middlecasters are the jokers in charge of ferrying the votes of their afflicted constituencies to the disgusting Democratic Party.
Within the fledgling Labor Party, top union officials kibosh running against the Dems—with the help of an entourage of onetime or sometime firebrands whose policy is to never challenge the labor elite. Race liberationists, meanwhile, are left with only a dim memory of the promising first days of the Rainbow Coalition as Jesse Jackson settles for the humiliation of a permanent seat at the rear end of the Democratic bus.
Silver-tongued misleaders are experts at swallowing the line handed down from the ruling class, no matter how foultasting, and regurgitating it for their audiences. First Feminists like Gloria Steinem, for instance, rationalize even the most mortal of Democrat sins, like dismantling welfare.
So how do we handle these tame tigers who make life miserable for the ranks and for serious change-seekers? We have to get them to switch their stripes, to move ahead or get out of the way, to just stop interrupting the class struggle!
Now hold it, some of you will argue; we need to defend this ilk because, after all, they represent us. But they don’t. Objectively, the middle caste—whether operating as elected officials, ideologues and pundits, or leftish movers and shakers—are agents of the other side. They are the labor (and other) lieutenants of the big bourgeoisie, with their retinue of allegedly socialist sergeants. Unfortunately, it’s easy to recognize our external enemy, but hard to realize or respond when our own standard-bearers are leading us toward defeat.
But if we build strong ranks, the leaders will change. And once a bold leadership emerges, they will come—the immense throngs who will climb aboard and stoke the charging locomotive delivering us to our historic destination of peace, plenty, reason—and rhyme, too.