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Vol. 80/No. 1 January 4, 2016
(feature article)
Priscilla March: Political cadre of SWP for 62 years
BY NAOMI CRAINE
LOS ANGELES — “Priscilla March was a political cadre, grounded in
working-class politics and the program and continuity of the Socialist
Workers Party. That is what sustained her for 62 years of building the
party,” said Norton Sandler, speaking for the SWP’s National Committee
at a Dec. 19 meeting here celebrating the life and political
contributions of March, who died Nov. 30 at the age of 95.
The previous weekend party branches in Los Angeles and Minneapolis
hosted celebrations of the political lives of two other cadres, Betsy
McDonald and Frank Forrestal. Articles on those meetings appeared in the
Dec. 28 issue of the Militant.
“Through these three comrades you get a picture of the Socialist Workers
Party over six decades and the individuals it’s made of,” Sandler said.
“None of us picks when we are born or how long we live, and much of what
happens in the class struggle is out of our control. Whatever the
circumstances, communists build the party and try to advance the line of
march of the working class toward power.”
March was born in 1920 and grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. Her father
was a doctor. She was independent-minded for a woman of her time. She
went to college, worked as a nurse, went through a brief marriage, and
traveled in Europe, wearing out her shoes visiting museums, before she
found the SWP.
When March joined in New York in 1953, it was at the height of a
deep-going political fight within the SWP over whether a revolutionary
working-class party organized along the lines of the Bolsheviks in
Lenin’s time could and should be built in the United States.
The centers of the faction fight were in New York and Detroit, Sandler
said. A minority in the New York branch aligned with Michel Pablo, then
a leader of the Fourth International in Europe. The election of Gen.
Dwight Eisenhower as president, they argued, made a nuclear war with the
Soviet Union inevitable. Moscow would attract progressive-minded people
everywhere and end up victorious, and this would give impetus to the
growth of Stalinist parties and the overturn of capitalism, establishing
“centuries of degenerated workers states” in a number of countries.
The task before communists, according to Pablo’s supporters, was to
enter these Stalinist parties, with a perspective of spending many years
in them — rather than seeing them as a counterrevolutionary obstacle as
the party, following Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, had for decades.
The majority of the Detroit branch was conservatized by the relative
prosperity that followed U.S. imperialism’s victory in World War II and
the pressures of the anti-communist witch hunt. They were in full
retreat from the perspective of building a revolutionary party. Both
groups that opposed the party majority lacked confidence in the working
class and its revolutionary capacities.
March and Harry Ring, who was already a party member and became her
life-long companion, had friends in both factions. March was won to the
political view of the SWP majority, led by party National Secretary
James P. Cannon, and built that party for the rest of her life.
Party responds to new openings
Developments in the class struggle soon brought home the correctness of
the party’s confidence in the fighting capacity of the working class.
This included an outpouring in 1955 for the funeral of Emmett Till, a
Black youth from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi, and the start
of the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama — milestones in what
became a mass, proletarian-led movement that brought down Jim Crow
racist segregation and transformed the U.S. working class in ways that
continue to be felt today.
Workers in Hungary rose up in 1956 against the bureaucratic abuses of
the pro-Moscow regime. This revolutionary upsurge was crushed by Soviet
tanks, but it showed new rebellious moods and cracks in the world
Stalinist monolith.
On Jan. 1, 1959, the workers and farmers in Cuba, led by Fidel Castro
and the July 26 Movement, overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship,
Sandler said, opening the road to the first socialist revolution in the
Americas. This proved in practice that it was possible to construct a
non-Stalinist leadership capable of leading the toilers to power.
“Harry and Priscilla were among the first party cadres to visit
revolutionary Cuba,” Sandler said. They were there in 1960 when many of
the U.S.-owned companies that dominated Cuba’s economy were nationalized
through working-class mobilizations.
New generations were won to the revolutionary working-class movement.
Wendy Lyons, a member of the Los Angeles SWP branch who joined in 1963,
spoke of how she and many others spent Saturday evenings in Harry and
Priscilla’s tiny New York apartment. “There was food, jazz, poker and,
above all, hours of political discussion, helping knit the continuity
between the generations to advance the struggle of the working class
toward socialism.”
Lyons recalled traveling with March on a bus to the historic August 1963
demonstration for Black rights in Washington. “We took 7,500 copies of
the Militant to the demonstration,” Lyons said, “and halfway through we
ran out. Priscilla was the top seller.”
March was picked up by the rise of the women’s rights movement. “She
knew how important women’s right to choose abortion was,” Lyons said,
“and with her party helped build the movement to win it.
“Like many of us at that time, she stopped using her husband’s name.
Most of us went back to the name we were born with. But Priscilla said,
‘If I wanted a man’s name I’d keep Harry’s. I picked March from the
calendar,’” Lyons recalled.
“The 1960s brought class struggle developments among Mexican Americans,”
said Joel Britton, organizer of the Oakland SWP branch, who chaired the
meeting. These included “farmworker battles for union recognition, mass
high school walkouts in Los Angeles, the 1970 Chicano Moratorium march
of 30,000 against the Vietnam War and the growth of La Raza Unida parties.”
The party opened a Southwest Bureau of the Militant organized by Ring,
and he and March moved to Los Angeles in 1971. “Harry traveled all over
reporting on these struggles,” Sandler said. And he gave classes on
party history throughout the region.
Continuity with struggles today
At the 50th Anniversary Convention of the United Farm Workers in 2012,
“some veterans asked party members attending about Harry and Priscilla,”
Britton said. “They were links in a chain of unbroken continuity of
support by the party to this still-vital social struggle. Just two days
ago, members and supporters of the party in Oakland, working with
leaders of the ‘$15 an hour and a union’ fight, organized a vanload of
fast-food and other workers to participate in a UFW Christmas party in
Fresno.”
For decades, March was centrally involved in organizing the distribution
of books on the party’s history and politics, today published by
Pathfinder Press. She drove all over the country, visiting stores and
libraries. Betsey Stone, a member of the SWP branch in Oakland, recalled
how when she joined in the early 1960s the party had a few books that
were essential in recruiting a new generation. Over the next decade as
the party grew, “we got some presses and published many more.
Priscilla’s work was to help get them out.”
Mike Tucker sent a message on behalf of the Communist League of New
Zealand. “It was through comrades like Priscilla,” he wrote, “that we
learned firsthand the rich history of the class struggle in the United
States and worldwide, and learned of the efforts of these comrades to
build a party and world movement. They brought to life politics and
class battles that we had read about in books. This helped us to
understand and become part of the continuity of the communist movement,
which is a living movement, the vanguard of working-class struggle, and
not a set of abstract ideas.”
When the party turned in the late 1970s to opportunities to get the
large majority of its members working in industry and the trade unions,
some of the older cadres of the party didn’t think it could or should be
done. “Priscilla and Harry discussed and argued with some of their
generation and helped win them over to the party’s course,” Sandler said.
“Priscilla was a stalwart of classes to systematically study the
writings of Lenin in the early 1980s,” he added, as part of deepening an
understanding of communist continuity throughout the party.
March helped organize Militant Labor Forums and petition drives for
party election campaigns. She “loved to sell the Militant, to knock on a
worker’s door and begin discussing the struggles going on, and how you
can join in. She kept doing it well into her ’80s,” Lyons said.
Some 50 people attended the meeting. Among them was Anita Wills, who is
active in the fight against police brutality in the Bay Area. She had
also attended the event celebrating the life of Betsy McDonald. Wills
said she could identify with these women, who “made a difference in the
party. A lot of times in this society when you’re older you’re not
considered relevant. The meetings made me feel connected to these ladies
and to the party.”
Participants enjoyed an excellent buffet, looked at displays on the
class-struggle events and political activity that shaped Priscilla
March’s life and read messages sent to the meeting. More than $2,200 was
donated to advance the work of the Socialist Workers Party.
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