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David Weiss: Long-time Trotskyist
by Marty Goodman / October 2005 issue of Socialist Action
newspaper
David Loeb Weiss, a founding
member of the Socialist Workers Party (1938), died on Aug. 11 at the age of
94. He died peacefully in San Diego of natural causes, holding the hand of
his companion, Vivian Gilbert-Strell.
A life-long revolutionist and
former Socialist Action member, Weiss was born into a working-class
immigrant Jewish family from Poland. He grew up on New York’s Lower East
Side, where radical politics and Eastern European Yiddish culture met.
In his life David was a busboy,
waiter, shipyard worker, farm hand, factory worker, and radar-man in World
War II. Weiss retired in 1978 after 18 years as a proofreader at The New
York Times. In the 1960s, he studied filmmaking and became an award-winning
documentary filmmaker.
David was raised in a political
family. Both parents were members of the Stalinized Communist Party (CP).
By trade his father was a tailor and Yiddish actor; his mother a garment
worker.
After work his mother would go
up and down tenement stairs selling the CP’s Daily Worker. His father was
often unemployed due to strikes and organizing drives. To help, David read writings of Yiddish
authors at workers’ centers, after which a hat was passed. David loved talking about the old
Yiddish culture—especially the curses—as we smoked cigars together on his
porch in Brooklyn. Yet, David was hostile to religious mysticism, which
often came with the culture. He was a staunch materialist.
In his youth David and his
brother Murray rode the rails coast to coast three times. David reenacted
for me the time he shouted at his brother to get him to leap between moving
cars to evade railroad security, "Jump, you yellow-bellied
bastard!" The frightened Murray jumped, and they made it to
California. Murray changed David’s
life when he introduced him to a follower of Russian revolutionary Leon
Trotsky. They read a pamphlet explaining the political outlook of the
Trotskyists, and began to unlearn their parents’ anti-Trotskyist dogmas.
Later on, David organized clerks
in the New York garment industry (1932); was an organizer of a New York
hotel workers’ strike (1934), and a leader of the victorious Dura-Steel
strike in Los Angeles (1937). He was an organizer of the Socialist Party
(SP) in Los Angeles (1936), when Trotskyists were in the SP; and an SWP
organizer in Youngstown, Chicago, and San
Francisco. In New York City in
the early 1950s he was an SWP candidate for mayor and governor.
David’s first film,
"Profile of a Peace Parade," (1968) features interviews with
antiwar New Yorkers at a large demonstration in Manhattan.
His favorite film, "No
Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger" (1968), is still being shown at film
festivals. It tackled racism and
the Vietnam War, its title lifted from a statement by Muhammad Ali. Said one film review, "The
strongest statement yet from the Black community … a startling cry of rage
and despair" (Los Angeles Open City). To buy or rent the film, go to www.Cinemaguild.com.
Other documentaries were "Farewell, Etaoin Shrdu" (1980), which captured the last day of the linotype machine at The New York Times and its replacement by newer technology, and one about the Young Socialist Alliance, the SWP’s former youth group.
In the early 1980s, Weiss was expelled from the SWP, as
were others who upheld Trotsky’s legacy and democratic norms. He was a
founding member of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency but left when it
dissolved into the loose organization Solidarity. He joined Socialist
Action in the mid-1990s but left a couple of years ago due to advanced age
and some
political differences.
His major unfinished film, "Planet Without a
Visa," includes interviews made in the late 1960s with over 45
individuals who had known or worked with Trotsky during his exile in the
U.S., Turkey, France, Norway, and Mexico—where he was murdered in 1940 by a
Stalinist agent. Included are moving recollections by one of Trotsky’s
bodyguards, Tom Robbins; his secretary, Jean van Heijenhoort; his wife
Natalia and grandson Esteban Volkov; SWP leader James Cannon; Trotskyist
historian Pierre Broue; and others.
Completing the film was Weiss’s dream, but declining
health and support for his ailing wife Victoria, a lifelong socialist who
died in the mid-1990s, made it impossible. Another obstacle was the $15,000
cost of converting hundreds of hours of unedited film to digital. If you
want to help ensure that this irreplaceable record is seen by future
generations, please call me at (212) 781-5157.
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