Caroline Lund (1944-2006)
By John Percy
Caroline Lund, a lifelong fighter for socialism, workers' rights, and women's liberation, died at her home in Oakland, California, on October 14, aged 62. She will be sorely missed by her friends and comrades in the US and around the world who knew her, especially her lifelong partner and comrade Barry Sheppard.
Caroline succumbed to the ravages of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease, physicist Stephen Hawking being a long-term sufferer.) Caroline first noticed the symptoms in August last year, but doctors took some time to make the diagnosis. The rapid muscular degeneration would have been especially frustrating to Caroline, an athletic person and a regular runner.
Caroline came from a conservative Lutheran family in the US Mid-West, but was won to revolutionary socialist ideas in 1962 when she attended Carlton College, a small liberal arts college just south of Minneapolis. Carlton had a very active socialist discussion club, whose members would later become part of the central leadership of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the main Trotskyist grouping in America at the time, including Jack Barnes, Betsey Stone, Mary Alice Waters, Dan Styron, Doug Jenness and John Benson.
Caroline quickly became a leader
of the SWP's youth organization, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). In 1965
she moved to New York where she met and married Barry Sheppard, a key younger
SWP leader. From 1967 she was often on full time for the SWP with a range of
assignments - leading different campaigns, organizing, international work, and
writing for the socialist press.
In recent years both Caroline and Barry have been strong supporters of Green
Left Weekly and collaborators of the Democratic Socialist Perspective here in
Australia. But both Caroline and Barry played a special role in helping the
development of the revolutionary Marxist current in Australia during the late
1960s and 1970s, as leaders at the time of the SWP and the international Trotskyist
organisation, the Fourth International (FI).
Barry visited Sydney in July 1969 on behalf of the FI and the SWP to make contact with the fledgling movement here, the socialist youth organisation Resistance that had grown out of the campaign against the war in Vietnam and the youth radicalisation, and the Marxists who eventually formed the DSP. One result of that trip was an invitation for a Resistance leader to attend the December 1969 YSA convention in Minneapolis. I was selected to go, and that's where I first met Caroline, and was immediately impressed by her political sharpness.
Minneapolis had been the site of a major industrial struggle by the Teamsters Union in the 1930s, and a victory by the US Trotskyists, well told by Farrell Dobbs in his series of books. Dobbs, a leader of the 1934 strike, was now the SWP national secretary. Holding the convention in the former stronghold of the US Trotskyists registered the new rise of the US Trotskyist movement during the campaign against the Vietnam War after the difficult years of the '50s.
I was very impressed by both the convention, an extremely exciting and dynamic event attended by 800 revolutionary youth, and the YSA and SWP. Dobbs delivered a powerful speech to the convention.
Caroline gave the report on the document on "The Worldwide Youth Radicalisation and the Tasks of the Fourth International," debating a leader of the FI's French section. A fierce debate had developed in the FI, initially over the question of the tactic or strategy of guerrilla warfare in Latin America, but quickly extending to nearly every political question.
Caroline and Barry were based in Brussels at that time, taking responsibility for the SWP's international work and working with the FI leadership. When they returned to the US one of Caroline's assignments was on the staff of the SWP's weekly newspaper The Militant, and many of Caroline's articles, especially on issues of women's liberation, were republished as pamphlets, which we distributed in Australia.
I next met Caroline in 1974-75, when I went to New York to work on Intercontinental Press, the weekly news magazine published by the SWP for the FI and edited by Joe Hansen. In 1975 Caroline also joined the IP staff for a time. I got to know Caroline better, reinforcing my impression of her as a wonderful human being and political leader.
From 1977-80 Caroline and Barry again went to Europe to work with the FI leadership, this time to Paris. During much of this time, the DSP also assigned party leaders to work with the FI in Paris, firstly Jim Percy, then DSP national secretary, and Nita Keig, and later Doug Lorimer. Australian comrades worked closely with Barry and Caroline, being in the same faction in the FI.
The '60s and early '70s was a period of great political advances for the SWP and YSA. The party had led many political upsurges, especially the mass movement against the Vietnam War, and had recruited the best of the radicalising youth. This new generation took over. Jack Barnes became the SWP national secretary, and Barry Sheppard for many years was national organisational secretary. Caroline was elected to the SWP national committee. This period of growth and political advance is described in Volume 1 of Barry's history of the SWP (The Party - The Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988. Volume 1: The Sixties, A political memoir. Resistance Books, 2005.) The book was written with the editorial assistance of Caroline. Barry's introduction recognises his indebtedness to his comrade - "This book would have been impossible without her."
The second volume, which Barry is currently working on, has to analyse a sadder period, the decline and degeneration of the SWP.
At the end of the 1970s the party decided on a "turn to industry", a push to get all its members into industrial jobs, in anticipation of a deep capitalist political and economic crisis and a sharp upsurge in the US class struggle and radicalisation. Unfortunately that projection didn't eventuate, but the SWP leadership persisted with the turn, "deepening" it, and increasingly losing touch with reality. The SWP and YSA's political work became increasingly sectarian, a sharp contract to the exemplary united front campaigns they led in the '60s and early '70s. Democratic norms were abandoned. Hundreds of members were expelled. Barry and Caroline were also pushed out, in 1988. Caroline and Barry moved from east to west and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area where they could be near their old friend and former SWP comrade Malik Miah, who had been expelled a few years earlier.
The DSP had broken our relations with the SWP as we saw it degenerate, but renewed our collaboration with former SWP leaders as they were expelled or forced out - first with Pedro Camejo, then with Barry, Caroline and Malik. Those expelled formed different organisations as they tried to pick up their political lives. Barry and Caroline have been involved in some of these - Solidarity, Socialist Action - and also formed an organisation with Malik Miah for a while in the Bay Area: Activists for Independent Socialist Politics.
Caroline had taken her first real industrial job at a GM plant in North Tarrytown, New York in 1980 as part of the SWP's turn to industry, and for the rest of her life was an active union militant. In the 1980s she was an autoworker, a garment worker, an electrical worker, a telephone worker, an oil worker, and a steel worker. In the Bay Area she briefly worked at an oil refinery, then at the Toyota NUMMI plant from 1992. At NUMMI, Caroline was a production worker until early 2006, when she went on disability due to her illness. For the last eight years Caroline produced a newsletter at NUMMI which was a model for rank-and-file union militants. Called The Barking Dog, it defended workers against the company's abuses and criticized the union bureaucrats of the Administration Caucus when they did not.
Caroline believed in the ability of workers to run their own unions and workplaces. "The rank and file are very ignorant about what real unionism is because they've never seen it in action, like the old-timers in the 1930s and 40s. But in many ways the rank and file understand more than the union officials," she said. "Malcolm X said that this society runs on money. The companies believe that for most people you lay that money down, and your soul goes, which is true in the short term. I don't think most of the existing unions can be reformed. They are too steeped in the culture of 'cooperation' with the companies, where the leadership thinks of the union as a source of perks for themselves and their friends. New unions are going to have to arise, from the bottom up, out of the ashes of the old."
Caroline was a GLW supporter, and a contributing editor of Links magazine. She attended the DSP December 2003 congress, writing a report that concluded: "Overall, the congress was very inspiring, full of energy, commitment and idealism. It reminded me so much of the US SWP in its good days of the '60s and '70s." Caroline also attended the Third Asia Pacific International Solidarity Conference in Sydney in March 2005.
Comrades who met her at these events warmly remember this passionate, courageous comrade, and deeply mourn her death. But her lifelong commitment to her socialist principles and activity will continue to inspire us.
(Memorial meetings for Caroline
are being organized for Saturday November 11, at 4 pm at the Humanist Hall in
Oakland, and for New York the following weekend. Messages should be sent to
<[email protected]>. Messages of condolence can be sent to Barry at <[email protected]>.)