[The following interview, conducted by Dominique Dhombres, appeared in the January 22-23 issue of the Paris daily Le Monde. The translation is by Intercontinental Press/Inprecor.]
She was the head of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. On April 24, 1971, she addressed half a million demonstrators in Washington, D.C. She was prominently mentioned in the "enemies list" secretly drawn up by the White House.
Now she is thirty years old, but nothing appears to have cut into her convictions, her militancy, or her optimism.
Debby Tarnopol is a leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).* She is also, sometimes-when she has a job, that is— an office worker. With short dark hair and somewhat severe eyeglasses on her attentive face, dressed in dark clothes, she calmly describes her activities: "Our task is above all an educational one. It is to make our party known. For some people in the United States, this is the only time they ever hear anyone talk about socialism in something besides a joking or hostile way."
She sometimes gets involved in election campaigns. She herself was a candidate for mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, and very recently for mayor of Louisville, Kentucky. She was unsuccessful both times, but then she never had any illusions about win-
*The SWP is associated with the Trotskyist Fourth International but is not officially a member. The Voorhis Act of 1940—still in force although little publicized-prohibits American organizations from joining international bodies that are deemed subversive.—Le Monde
Richard Graef/Militant
DEBBY TARNOPOL
ning. She understands that the struggle is elsewhere: "You don't elect socialism; you build it."
The SWP was founded in 1928 (it took its present name in 1938) from a split in the young American Communist Party. Several party leaders, on their return from a trip to Moscow, declared their support for Trotsky's ideas on the bureaucratism of the new socialist state and were promptly expelled. Despised by the "Stalinists," who were much larger, the Trotskyists managed to keep themselves together somehow during the period between the wars and to put out their weekly, The Militant, more or less regularly.
The "witch-hunt" and McCarthyism of struggle" and the "falling profit rate of capitalism": in particular, the environment, the women's liberation movement, ment the women's liharation movemont and defense of sexual minorities. She herself is a member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), one of the most important American feminist organizations. Debby Tarnopol denies any contradiction between Marxism and these "innovations."
"Women begin to rebel," she explains, "when they as workers suffer the most from the crisis capitalism is in." Similarly, she says that the demands of the environmental movement-and particularly those of the antinuclear campaign-have gotten a national response because the "system," always in search of higher profits, cannot avoid upsetting the environment in an increasingly dangerous way.
Debby Tarnopol is not a mystic. She does not think revolution is around the corner, but she calmly insists that the future of the United States lies in socialism. Her belief is based above all on the recent emergence of more combative attitudes among certain industrial workers, especially the steelworkers and the coal miners. "Wildcat" strikes have multiplied, showing a certain independence in relation to the traditional trade unions. Even within these unions, certain figures have emerged who challenge the capitalist system itself, breaking the American unions' long tradition of being as pragmatic and nonideological as possible.
Debby Tarnopol occasionally stretches her optimism a bit, or perhaps she has the very American ability to make a virtue out of necessity. Isn't there some contradiction in thinking-as she does-that Marxism is more likely to come to the United States than to Europe, because the absence of a social democratic party in the New World may mean that the United States will not be "infected with opportunism'"?