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Frank Girard - a Tribute

Frank Girard, the driving force behind the Discussion Bulletin – a publication which has had a seminal influence on the World in Common group – sadly passed away on the 19th February 2004.

Frank was born in 1927 in Michigan, USA. He was a long-standing libertarian socialist and popular local activist. He was a candidate for the Socialist Labor Party in many elections. He founded the Society for Economic Equality, co-authored a book on SLP and produced and distributed numerous leaflets and pamphlets. In 1983 Frank started DB which ceased publication in 2003. For many of us who subscribed to DB, it was a great pleasure to receive the journal through the post every few months or so. In his own words, the Discussion Bulletin:

… places the great divide in the “left”, not between anarchists and Marxists, but between capitalism’s statist left wing of vanguardists and social democrats, and the real revolutionaries of our era: the non-market, anti-statist, libertarian socialists. It is organized in small groups of syndicalists, communist anarchists, libertarian municipalists, world socialists, socialist industrial unionists, council communists, and left communists. The perspective of these groups with their rejection of capitalism’s wage, market, and money system, along with capitalist politics and unionism, constitutes the only real alternative to capitalism in both its market and statist phases.

The purpose of DB was to bring together the “often fiercely antagonistic groups that make up this sector” and provide a forum in which they can “debate and discuss the issues that divide them, gain some understanding of their history and future possibilities, and begin a process, we hope, of at least limited cooperation.” There can be no more fitting tribute to Frank than to carry on the good work that he pioneered. This is what we in the World in Common group have resolved to do.

Robin Cox (World in Common)

Frank Girard: In Memorial

I was deeply saddened to hear last month of the passing of Frank Girard, the long time editor of the publication. Frank stopped publishing the Discussion Bulletin in July 2003 citing his age and the increasing importance of the internet, which he felt made publications like the Discussion Bulletin less and less relevant. He planned continued involvement in the socialist movement. His death at 77 is a felt loss to his many friends and comrades. Frank worked as a machine operator and later a high school English teacher, but more important was his membership from the 1940s on in the Socialist Labor Party, the organization of followers of American socialist leader Daniel De Leon. Frank ran for political office several times in Michigan, but argued he was “running against capitalism.” Unsurprisingly, he was never elected. In the early 1980s, as part of a seemingly endless series of schisms in the SLP, Frank was expelled from the party along with much of the Grand Rapids section (in 1991 he published a short history of the party along with another former Socialist Labor Party member Ben Perry). In 1983, Frank began to publish the Discussion Bulletin. The Discussion Bulletin was unlike many other socialist publications in that it was simply a forum for discussion. Its contents were, aside from Frank’s editorial remarks and occasional contributions, entirely from its readership. It was also a model of regularity for socialist publications, appearing every two months like clockwork for twenty years. Frank’s other strength was that he was genuinely committed to discussion and debate in what he called the non-market socialist sector, in which he included De Leonists, World Socialists, council and left communists, and class struggle anarchists among others. Throughout its existence the Discussion Bulletin featured, unedited, contributions from all of the above sectors. And although he never completely broke with De Leonist politics and all its incumbent weaknesses, but which had played such an important role in his life, Frank was also prepared to learn from discussion, and admit when he was wrong. Frank was a non-sectarian in the best sense of the word. The cessation of publication by the Discussion Bulletin left a hole. Frank’s passing leaves a much larger one.

Neil F. (Red & Black)

Obituary for Frank Girard

We have just received a report that Frank Girard, who edited and published - virtually single-handedly - the Discussion Bulletin for twenty years from 1983 to 2003 died last month at the age of 77. Frank had been a member of the Socialist Labor Party (the De Leonist organization in the U.S.) from the 1940s until his expulsion in the early 1980s, even running for political office on the SLP ticket. He began the Discussion Bulletin as an open forum for the exchange of political views by De Leonists, anarchists, libertarians, left communists, etc. - what he called “non-market socialists.” Not only were the pages of Discussion Bulletin open to a wide range of political views, but the publication appeared like clockwork on a bimonthly basis, something of a rarity in this political milieu.

The ICC had many polemical exchanges with Frank, particularly on the political legacy of De Leonism, especially its blind spot when it came to the mystifications of bourgeois democracy. Despite its opposition to reformism, and despite the lessons of history, De Leonism, and Frank, persisted in a naive belief that capitalism could be overthrown at the ballot box. We also frequently criticized Frank for not publishing more exchanges on contemporary issues facing the working class, especially imperialist war. He once told us in a letter that he didn’t republish any of the leaflets or articles against the various American imperialist ventures in the 1990s because all the groups had the same position, even though there were many different analyses for the causes of the war, and proposals for how the working class could oppose war. He finally seemed to take this criticism to heart at the time of the most recent US invasion of Iraq by publishing a collection of leaflets by various groups.

Whatever criticisms we made of Frank, and he of us, it was always clear that they were made as part of a fraternal debate between comrades who were committed to the destruction of capitalism and the liberation of the working class. When Frank Girard made the decision to cease publication we urged him not to. We argued that the Discussion Bulletin played an invaluable role of mutually introducing to each other the elements of a very disparate, far flung political milieu. After the publication of the last issue of Discussion Bulletin last July, we sent Frank a letter saluting his efforts on behalf of the proletariat, wishing him well in his retirement, and giving him a subscription for life to the press of the ICC. We had no idea at the time that his life would sadly end so soon. We extend our condolences and solidarity to the family and friends of Frank Girard.

Internationalism,
Section in the US of the ICC