Jewish Holocaust survivor, a socialist, activist and author, links her long ago Holocaust experience with her hopes for a socialist, humanist, and earth-loving society.
Below is my 15 minute contribution to a panel discussion given on May 22, 2021 on zoom in La Grande Transition, a post-capitalist international conference. My talk is based on an article — A Socialist Woman’s Experience in the Socialist Movement — published in March-April 2021 in a socialist magazine, Against the Current. * * * *
Like all women, I have coped with the threat of sexual and physical assault and harassment. For women, this threat is omnipresent. It was a constant hazard of my younger years. Later, the danger of sexual attack shaped decisions of where I lived and with whom, where I worked and whether I felt able to speak and act freely. All told I suffered more than a dozen threatened sexual assaults. I suspect that this count is not unusual.
When I joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) USA in 1959, at the age of 18, anxiety of sexual assault was an obstacle to my participation in political activity. The threat could come from a stranger or from an intimate friend.
I fell victim to this threat in the dormitory of a socialist conference. It was evening, and an intimate friend flew into a rage. He bellowed and whacked me, with furniture and props flying around. It was behind closed doors, but the uproar was heard outside the room, and the assault left visible marks on my face. Yet the next day, socialist friends averted their eyes and showed no concern.
On April 22, 2021, I gave the following short talk in honour of James P. Cannon (1890–1974), an outstanding socialist leader who helped found the U.S. Communist movement in 1919 and subsequently became a central leader of Trotskyism on a world scale.
My talk is based on my experience as personal secretary to Jim Cannon during the last two years of his life. In the discussion period, I referred to Cannon’s many volumes of speeches, letters, and articles available from Pathfinder Press (see below).
In the discussion after the presentations, I strongly suggested studying Socialism on Trial and Defense Policy in the Minneapolis Trials, in which Cannon provides a popular introduction to and defense of the ideas of revolutionary Marxism. One outstanding one lesson is how the working class looks at its battles against the system of capitalism. The majority of these struggles are for their alienable rights as human beings and as members of a society. Cannon explained that workers looked at the Russian revolution not as an insurrection but as a defense of these rights.
I met James P. Cannon in 1960 when his partner Rose Karsner invited me to their home for a chat. Jim gave a cordial hello and listened while Rose asked me about my student activism for Cuba and Black freedom. She was also interested in my background, which was similar to hers – the Jewish community in Eastern Europe. Rose was highly regarded by the party as one of its founders and as a serious organizer well versed in the theories of Marx.
A decade later, I served as Jim Cannon’s personal secretary. Rose had recently died of cancer. The impact of this blow was of great concern to Jim’s comrades. They convinced Jim to review his life’s work in speeches, writings, and letters, which were consequently published in several volumes. I was the fourth person to serve as his full-time assistant. In addition, two male comrades lived with him and provided companionship in the evenings.
When I joined the household, Jim was 82. Physically frail, and suffering from emphysema, he exuded an air of dignity.
Visitors came from time to time, and Jim greeted them with pleasure. He was glad to hear reports of developments in his party. He welcomed varying points of view.
Jim, first and foremost, championed the working class, and its international efforts. In his conversations, Jim seethed over the crimes of capitalism. He watched the Watergate corruption scandal, which led to Richard Nixon’s demise. He cheered Nixon’s downfall and even more the way the disgrace exposed the deceptions of the supposedly democratic political apparatus.
Jim bemoaned Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinian people. What a terrible turn Israel was foisting on the Jewish people. In their name — the Israeli government was abusing the calamity of the Holocaust and acting criminally against the innocent Palestinians and Arab peoples.
Jim no longer had the energy to review his remaining personal papers, but he agreed to be interviewed by Harry Ring, a party writer and activist whom Jim had known since the thirties. Jim was gratified by the leading role his young comrades took in social movements, particularly against the war, in the Black freedom movement, and women’s liberation.
To gain more insight into the man, Harry tried to get Jim to talk about himself, but Jim was reticent. Finally, Jim softened a little and mentioned a number of small personal incidents highlighting his own inadequacies and regretting his own behaviour. He liked to repeat the dictum, — “Man know thyself.” — Then he would add, “Man forget thyself.” — I identified with that. It threw a light on the unselfish focus in his dedication to improving the human condition.
Jim’s books, articles, and speeches are guides to apply Marxism’s dialectical method in the US and Canada. — It was an honour to have had a close link with this great giant of labour and socialism.
The Coming American Revolution America’s Road to Socialism The Communist League of America: Writings 1932-34 The First Ten Years of American Communism The Left Opposition in the US: Writings 1928-31 Letters from Prison Notebook of an Agitator Speeches to the Party Socialism on Trial The Socialist Workers Party in World War II Speeches for Socialism The Struggle for a Proletarian Party
Building the Revolutionary Party Fighting to Socialism In the ‘American Century’ The Revolutionary Party: Its Role In the Struggle for Socialism
Prometheus Research Library
Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933 Early Years of American Communism: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-28
Published in Socialist Magazine, Against the Current
March 2021
Suzanne Weiss speaking at a demonstration in Toronto, 2019.
1. Barriers to Women’s Participation
FROM ITS BEGINNINGS in the 1800s, modern socialism has embraced equality and liberation for women. The socialist movement has made a major contribution to political, cultural, and intellectual changes challenging women’s second-class status. For many women, joining a socialist movement opened the road to developing their talents, achieving social influence, and contributing to social change.
This zoom talk was given in a panel organized by Socialist Action Canada in October 2020. It focuses on the defense and expansion of democratic rights of fighters for a new society representing their human needs.
Sixty-one years ago, I learned how a socialist transformation would be possible in the heart of the beast, the USA.
I learned from socialists who had met Lenin and Trotsky in Moscow, who knew the Russian Revolution first-hand: Jim Cannon, Rose Karsner, Arne Swabeck, and others, members of my local branch in Los Angeles. They drew on ideas in the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels and the History of theRussian Revolution by Trotsky.
They published their view of revolutionary strategy in a book called Socialism on Trial, which was our socialist recruitment handbook at the time and is now on line.It’s a transcript of a famous court case which should to be read and studied today, especially in the climate of growing mass social movements.
In 1941 Cannon and seventeen other socialists were arrested and charged with conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government by force and violence. — That’s the eternal slander of the political police against socialists, then and now.
I’ve learned to make concise and cogent speeches in the three minutes appropriate for rallies and meetings. Of the several dozen “three-minute” talks I have on file, here are six examples.
Against Islamophobia and white supremacy
The video version of this speech made a rally against Islamophobia and white supremacy went viral and received over 26,000 views as of this posting.
I speak today as a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. Nazism took the lives of most of my family and six million my Jewish community. I and so many other Holocaust survivors are here only because of people united to protect us.
What is anti Semitism? It is simply the hatred of Jewish people. Amazingly, Donald Trump honoured the Holocaust by omitting, and in essence denying history. He forgot to mention that that six million Jews were murdered in the attempt to eliminate the whole Jewish people. It’s amazing that we heard no one object to this omission, and we especially did not hear a peep from Israel who prides itself on building a Jewish state. Continue reading Six three-minute speeches …
9 October 2016 — The triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959 gave rise to widespread solidarity work in the U.S. and Canada, organized through Fair Play for Cuba committees. Two participants in this experience report here on its scope and lessons.
John Riddell and Suzanne Weiss gave the following joint talk on the work of Fair Play for Cuba on July 31, 2016, at a conference of Ideas Left Outside at Elbow Lake, Ontario. For other writings on Fair Play for Cuba, see below.
John Riddell: On September 2, 1960, one million Cubans gathered in Havana in a General Assembly of the Cuban people to hear and approve Cuba’s reply to U.S. attacks on its sovereignty. This statement, known as the First Declaration of Havana, pledged Cuba to nothing less than a hemispheric struggle for freedom from U.S. domination. Continue reading Fair Play! Building solidarity with revolutionary Cuba (1960-1970)
Based on a talk given to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago, June 28, 2013.
Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has a dream. If he has his way Canada will be the new world oil superpower – a rival to Saudi Arabia. It’s a wonderful dream for Harper and Canada’s profiteers, but the reality for the rest of humankind is grim. Here in Toronto we are gaining experience in resisting this project.
What are the tar sands? They are a mixture of tar and sand that must be boiled to extract the tarry oil, called bitumen. The process of extraction, which covers a large part of Alberta, destroys and poisons the surroundings, causing cancer and many other illnesses. Indigenous peoples who live on this land and have treasured its bounty, denounce corporations and government for this destruction. Continue reading Resisting the tar sands: An ecosocialist approach
I made the following comments to a celebration of John Riddell’s multi-volume series of books on the history of the world revolutionary movement. The meeting, attended by 120 people, took place on March 3, 2013. We were marking the publishing of John’s book on the Communist International’s Fourth World Congress, Toward the United Front.Here is what I said:
John’s books show that the Comintern was led by many persons, a team. And John himself is a team person. That was his approach from his youth, and it is how he organized his Comintern publishing.
17 February 2013 – by Sarah Berliner. Toward the United Front, John Riddell’s edition of the Communist International’s Fourth Congress, is “an outstanding achievement in the recuperation of pivotal historical experiences for the revolutionary left of today and the future,” Marxist author David McNally told an enthusiastic gathering of 120 people in Toronto, March 3.
The Fourth Congress proceedings, 1,300 pages long, make up the seventh installment in a series of documentary volumes edited by Riddell, which present a record of the world revolutionary movement in Lenin’s time. The soft-cover edition has just been published by Haymarket Books.
31 January 2013 — Green Left Weekly — Fifty years ago, on February 13, 1963, the publication of US writer and activist Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique sparked a new awakening in the thinking of women across North America. Friedan denounced the repression women suffered in the aftermath of World War II, when they were forced out of wartime jobs and convinced to accept the role of keepers of the home.
Profiteers of the market launched an unrelenting but subtle propaganda campaign to venerate women as wife and mother. This role, Friedan said, was the “feminine mystique”.
This domestic existence became, Friedan wrote, “a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity”. In submitting to this concept of womanhood, women gave up their self-respect, recognition of their talents and abilities, and — most importantly — their identities. Fundamentally, Friedan said, this was a scam to sell more consumer goods to women, who were to be the major purchasers for home and family. Continue reading 50 years since ‘The Feminine Mystique’
