Hello, everyone. It’s good to see (so many) old comrades and friends here to celebrate the life of Gus Horowitz.

I got to know Gus personally in the 1970s when I was assigned by the Canadian section of the Fourth International to work with Joseph Hansen on the staff of Intercontinental Press. The IP office shared its space with the SWP national office, where Gus was employed and we often traded thoughts between us on the issues of the day. Like so many, I treasured Gus’s insightful comments, often enhanced by his quiet sense of humor. He was a real mensch, totally without pretense.

When I remember Gus today, however, I think in particular of the role he played in our movement as an educator, as he was known to so many of us both in the United States and internationally. I want to note three issues on which he helped to clarify our thinking.

First was his contribution in synthesizing the lessons we had learned from our movement’s participation in the new mass movements that had arisen during the 1960s in the advanced capitalist countries. Gus edited a book, Towards an American Socialist Revolution: A Strategy for the 1970s, published by Pathfinder Press in 1971, that included the main speeches from the first of what became the party’s annual gatherings at Oberlin, Ohio. In his introductory essay, Gus noted how the new movements were tackling “an entire range of historically overdue democratic tasks….” I quote:

“[M]ovements such as the women’s liberation movement, the struggles of oppressed nationalities for self-determination, the gay liberation movement, and the revolution in culture are a part of the general struggle against the outmoded capitalist system… Thus these new movements are not unimportant or peripheral to the socialist revolution, but at the center of its advance.”

In retrospect, he wrote much later, “the Prospects book was marred by an over-optimistic triumphalism towards the real prospects for revolution in the United States…. But I still believe that the essays in this book best captured the spirit of the time as well as a deep appreciation of the new aspects of class struggle that had come to the fore in the 1960s radicalization.” I am quoting from a post he published on his blog that is well worth reading today.

A second notable contribution was Gus’s emphasis on the importance of the national question in socialist strategy: how the democratic struggles of oppressed and occupied peoples against their national oppression are part of the proletarian struggle for state power and help to determine the class and national characteristics of that power. As Barry Sheppard noted, Gus illustrated this when he played a central role in the party’s turn to defending the struggle for a secular democratic Palestine as the alternative to the Zionist settler state established in 1948.

Thirdly, Gus was an articulate proponent of the united front of workers’ parties and movements as a central component of socialist strategy in the capitalist era. I got to see this in 1975 when I accompanied Gus and his then-companion Becky Finch on a visit to Portugal where a pre-revolutionary situation had developed in the wake of the 1974 military overthrow of the far-right Caetano regime. In the April 1975 elections to the Constituent Assembly, the combined vote for the Communist and Socialist parties was over 50 percent, the SP receiving the largest vote. Although this posed the need to press for an SP-CP government as a means of promoting a break from capitalism – something neither the SP nor CP advocated – the CP was blocking with the governing Armed Forces Movement in which an increasingly influential demagogic “left” had issued a call for dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by promising MFA support for a government of peoples or workers councils. The CP was maneuvering with the MFA and in some unions to suppress SP influence. (Barry Sheppard provides a detailed account in the chapter on Revolution in Portugal in volume 2 of his SWP history.)

Our prime objective was to speak with members of the two groups there identified with the Fourth International, one with the majority FI leadership, the other with a section of the minority Leninist-Trotskyist Faction strongly influenced by the Argentine PST and its leader Nahuel Moreno. Both groups rejected the call for an SP-CP government and in differing ways shared the misestimation that the embryonic organizations of workers’ councils and commissions were in fact rapidly becoming mass soviets that could overthrow the bourgeois state and take power. We thought this was a major error and Gus expressed our criticisms in his 1976 report published as “The Differences Over Portugal,” now available on the web, as is the LTF resolution The Key Issues in the Portuguese Revolution, which Gus helped to draft. As Gus put it (and again I quote),

“The workers do need soviets. But in order to build such organizations it is necessary to convince the workers why they need such organs…. The workers have to be convinced to break with the [Armed Forces Movement] and the bourgeois parties. They have to be convinced that a governmental bloc between workers parties and bourgeois forces is an obstacle to socialism. They have to be convinced of the value of united front actions on all levels. The workers of the SP and the CP have to be convinced of the need for and the possibility of working together. If they could be convinced of these ideas, then a big step would be taken towards the construction of genuinely representative soviets.”

And he backed this analysis by reference to many historical analogies starting with the 1917 Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia.

I have said enough.

Gus Horowitz, ¡Presente!

Richard Fidler