This Socialist Organizer do***ent contains more on the Lambertiste
view of the 1960s. I infer they do not believe the SWP decisively
degenerated until the middle 1970s. It was the position of the IC
circe 1971 as I recalll, that many healthy elements still remained in
the SWP. It seems that the Lambertistes, like Healy and Wohlforth,
viewed the SWP as closer to Trotskyism than the Mandelites.
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Strengths and Weaknesses of Cannonism
Written by Frank Wainwright
As we prepare the reproclamation Congress of the Fourth International,
it is im****tant for us to undertake a re-evaluation of =93Cannonism=94.1
=93Cannonism=94 has to be understood in a contradictory way. The strength
of =93Cannonism=94=97to which we shall return=97lies in Cannon=92s having
constructed and preserved a Trotskyist organisation, related to the
processes of the class struggle in the United States and which
acquired an implantation and experience which cannot be disputed.
Cannon=92s strength lay in his educating one generation, and even
several generations, of cadres on the basis of fidelity to the
programme and especially, after the death of Trotsky, putting into
operation the orientation which Trotsky defined as to the attitude
towards the imperialist war. From this point of view, Socialism on
Trial, the text of Cannon=92s defence at the trial of the Minneapolis 16
in 1941, remains at one and the same time one of the most pedagogic
and the most popular presentations of Marxism adapted to the situation
in the United States, and the expression of internationalist principle
in a situation when such a position was not an easy one to defend.
It has frequently been stressed in our movement that the principal
weakness of =93Cannonism=94 was that at different stages in the history of
the Fourth International and of the SWP itself, Cannon did not always
accept his responsibilities from the standpoint of the construction of
the Fourth International. This tendency had already appeared during
Trotsky=92s life-time. It expressed itself, particularly after the end
of World War II, precisely on the question of the military policy of
the SWP. This policy had been the object of criticism on the part of
im****tant elements in the Fourth International, starting with Pablo,2
and in particular had been the object of a regular polemic on the part
of Munis. However, it is significant that, at the Second World
Congress of the Fourth International in 1948, the discussion on the
balance sheet of ten years of the Fourth International (and such
years, including the whole of the Second World War and what followed
it!) took up, overall, barely an hour, including translations, and
that in particular the balance-sheet of the military policy of the SWP
was not raised, either by its detractors or by the leaders of the SWP
itself.
Nonetheless, the SWP has always placed great im****tance on this
question. In particular, Socialism on Trial had always formed part of
the fundamental materials for educating and forming the militants of
the SWP. Socialism on Trial includes both the polemic by Munis and the
reply of Cannon to Munis.
But this question had been exclusively adopted by the leaders of the
SWP as an element in the education of the cadres of the SWP itself. At
the 1948 World Congress, the attitude of the leaders of the SWP
clearly showed that the necessary generalisation of the principled
questions raised in this discussion, questions necessary to the
education of the cadres of the whole Fourth International, the
repercussions of which could be im****tant in many of the sections, did
not seem to the SWP leader****p to be part of their responsibilities.
We also find these tendencies to =93national-Trotskyism=94 at different
stages in the life of the SWP. It is particularly significant to
remember how the SWP leader****p acted in the crisis of 1950-53. As
long as it did not seem to be threatened in its own existence, the
leader****p of the SWP not only refused to intervene in the developing
crisis, but it politically sup****ted the destructive activity of Pablo
and then of Pablo and Mandel in the leader****p of the Fourth
international. We remember the letter of Daniel Renard, in the name of
the majority of the Central Committee of the French section, to the
leader****p of the SWP, which was nothing less than an appeal for help
against the liquidationist maneuvers of Pablo, Mandel et al.=97a letter
which remained unanswered on the part of the SWP.
In the end, it was only when the liquidationist offensive of Pablo and
Mandel had extended to the internal life itself of the SWP that the
leader****p of the SWP reacted. It is significant to reread the re****t
which the SWP leader****p presented to the Plenum in August 1953 at the
moment of the split. This re****t makes very little reference to Pablo
and his course towards destroying the Fourth International. It is
principally devoted to Clark and Cochrane,3 that is, to the North-
American consequences and the North-American expression of the
liquidationist offensive. In the stages which followed, the leader****p
of the SWP followed a consistent line in this regard:
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the leader****p of the SWP did not take
in hand the effective leader****p of the International Committee which
had come into existence in 1953;
In 1963, the SWP accepted a =93reunification=94 with the liquidators of
Trotskyism that barred discussion of the political questions that had
led to the split of 1953 and that remained unresolved;
In the 1970s, an internal struggle developed in the United Secretariat
following the 1969 USec =93World Congress=94 around the question of the
guerrilla strategy, then on that of the balance sheet of the Cultural
Revolution in China, the strategy for the construction of parties in
Europe, the theory of new vanguards. This internal struggle was to
reach its height in relation to the development of the ****tuguese
Revolution in 1974-75.
What is constant throughout is that at each stage the SWP was led to
pose the questions about the Fourth International from the starting
point of the consequences, good or bad from its point of view, for the
existence of the SWP. Moreover, this refusal to accept its
responsibilities at the international level is what was to lead it to
dissolve the Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction4 in 1977, in cir***stances
which we have discussed elsewhere. The dissolution of the LTF was to
hasten the process of degeneration of the SWP toward an openly
Castroist and pro-Stalinist course, starting from the era of the
1970s, to end with suppressing any reference to the Fourth
International or to Trotskyism altogether.
This national-Trotskyist component of the SWP=92s political activity, a
component which became more acute as the years passed, is, of course,
to be placed in relation to the difficult conditions which have
attended the activity itself of the SWP at many stages. The Cold War,
the witchhunt, the extremely brutal repression of militant workers
and, therefore, against the Trotskyist militants in the workplaces at
the end of the 1940s and in the 1950s, and the serious isolation with
which the SWP has been surrounded=97all these have borne down by no
means lightly on the SWP. Nonetheless, this situation is derived,
equally, from the subjective weaknesses of the SWP leader****p and in
particular from the subjective weaknesses of =93Cannonism.=94
There is one aspect which has perhaps not been sufficiently brought to
light in earlier studies: This is the correspondence between the
tendencies to national-Trotskyism in the leader****p of the SWP and
their renunciation in practice of the perspective which Trotsky
outlined of the struggle for the Labor Party and the Black Party.
Here, also, it is not a matter of proceeding in a schematic way. The
conditions for bringing about the orientation towards the Labor Party
and the Black Party have not always been visible, which is the least
that we can say.
During the periods of isolation, of reaction, this orientation was
extremely difficult to express in a concrete, practical way.
Nonetheless, without re-writing history, it is indispensable to begin
by reviewing the way in which Trotsky worked this orientation out; in
what practical conditions, including dialogue with the SWP, was he led
to work it out, and then what were the practical conditions or its
application or non-application which have marked the question for the
last fifty years.
Trotsky=92s consistent orientation, in relation to the United States as
to other countries, always was to try to arrive at the ways and means
which would permit the militants of the Fourth International to break
out of their isolation, in relation to the unfolding processes in the
working class and its organisations, so as to enable them to link
themselves with layers of the workers=92 movement in the process of
becoming radicalised=97in brief, to develop the appropriate transitional
forms in the construction of the revolutionary party of the Fourth
International.
This preoccupation was perhaps still greater for Trotsky for the
United States than for other countries, in relation to his
appreciation of the delay in the political development of American
working class and consequently the greater difficulties with which the
Trotskyist militants found themselves confronted. For example, at the
time the perspective of tem****ary entry by the Trotskyist militants
into the Socialist Party was being debated, Trotsky was led to reply
to a series of objections, among which was the objection that the
American Socialist Party was small and that its social composition was
bad. Trotsky replied:
The Socialist Party in the United States is not small by chance; the
political regroupment of the proletarian vanguard advances in America
with terrifying slowness. Already Engels had had to come to grips with
this problem, but we must not forget that the fundamental factors
which make the crystallisation of a revolutionary vanguard difficult
in America do not operate exclusively against the Socialist Party, but
also against us, and that, despite the change in the economic
conditions, the psychological inertia which the trade unions have
transformed into a tradition cannot be overcome immediately. (=93Defence
of the Position Adopted on the United States,=94 Oeuvres, Vol. 8,
February 1936)
Trotsky added:
The cohesive force of the larger parties is much more im****tant than
that of the small ones; one does not break so easily with a mass
party. This explains in part why in France we have been able to keep
relatively few new elements when we were excluded. Since the American
(Socialist) is not exactly a real mass party, our influence can show
itself to be much more decisive there. We can evaluate the practical
possibilities as modestly as one pleases, but no one will dispute that
the Workers Party and the Spartacus League can double the number of
their members. Even a gain of 50% would not be without im****tance in
the present situation. (Ibid.)
To those who opposed the entry into the Socialist Party and who
opposed this perspective with some other way, Trotsky replied: =93This
other way has in any case been tested and has revealed itself to be a
permanent crisis.=94 In 1936, Trotsky saw the principal danger
threatening the revolutionary vanguard as sectarian self-isolation,
self-proclamation cut off from any attempt to link up with the
processes of radicalisation that were going on, however modest they
might be.
Trotsky had the sup****t of the Cannon-Shachtman fraction in this
battle to enter the Socialist Party, against the sectarian tendencies
of Muste, Oehler, etc. But we shall return to this question, which was
to find a continuity in the history of the SWP. In 1936, likewise,
Trotsky identified a question which is at the centre of the whole
fight to construct the Fourth International in the United States, and
laid stress on the following contradiction:
The past of America is filled with strikes and heroic leader****p, but
without political crystallisation. There is now a change in the
objective situation, which must produce a change in the state of mind
of the workers, perhaps in six months or six years, we cannot know.
(=93Problem of Entry in the United States,=94 February 8, 1936, Oeuvres,
Volume 8)
We can say in a certain way that this contradiction between the
sharpness of the class struggle in the United States, the appearance
of =93heroic leader****p=94 and the absence of =93political
crystallisation=
=94
has remained unresolved first and foremost for objective reasons. The
policy of betrayal of the Communist International was to close the
road to the construction of an independent political representation of
the working class, as we shall see, and, during World War II this
obstacle was to be strengthened to the point that despite the every
im****tant progress which the Trotskyists were to make during World War
II and the real strengthening which they experienced at its end, this
road was generally to be closed to them.
In a certain way we can say that today as well, the present condition
of America is full of strikes and that the question which is posed is
that of =93political crystallisation.=94 Investigating this question was a
constant preoccupation for Trotsky. Analysing the crisis in the United
States, he wrote:
At the depth of the crisis, the American working class remained
essentially passive. This was the result in part of the objective
violence of the blows to which it was exposed after a long period of
prosperity. It was also due in part to this subjective factor, which
meant that, because of the particular conditions of the American
development, the working class was entering the crisis with small,
weak organisations in the political as well as the economic domain.
Since 1933, however, the history of the American working class is
characterised by nearly uninterrupted activity and combativity.
Dogged, persistent efforts to organise, which often culminated in the
most heroic strike struggles, were often undertaken by the workers,
including those in the key industries such as steel, auto, rubber,
public utilities and ****pping, where in the past the trade union
movement had never been able to strike roots.
The effects of this new stage in the development of American
capitalism and of the pressure of the m***** express themselves in the
polemic which is developing at the present time in the American
Federation of Labor, the deepest and the most embittered of the
polemics in the whole history of this conservative institution. The
leaders of some of the largest affiliated unions=97such as John L. Lewis
of the miners=97frontally attack the traditional policy of the craft
unions of the federation, and demand that the workers in the mass
production industries have the right to organise in industrial unions
and be recruited to them.
Inside the A.F. of L., they formed a committee for organising the
industrial unions, the C.I.O., in order to help the workers in the
most im****tant industries to organise on an industrial basis. They
refused to accept the demand from the executive of the A.F. of L. that
they dissolve the C.I.O. and are now engaged in preparations for a
campaign to organise in heavy industry. However, there can be no doubt
that a vast movement for organisation and strikes in a key industry
cannot be considered today in the United States as a purely trade
union question. It leads of necessity to a conflict with the bourgeois
class in general and with the state apparatus, and this implies the
deepest social consequences. (=93On the United States of America=94, July
1936, Oeuvres, Volume 10)
Trotsky reviewed the obstacles which the American working class faced,
and stressed what he called =93the Stalinist policy of betrayal=94, which
expressed itself particularly in the fact that =93the American Communist
Party uncritically sup****ts the =91progressive=92 trade union bureaucrats,
and collaborates often with the most reactionary elements in the trade
unions=94. (Ibid.)
In particular, the fact that =93even though in the presidential
elections the Communist Party of the United States stands its own
candidates and in that way sup****ts the illusion that it is
independent and its revolutionary phraseology, in reality, by its
sup****t for the trade union leaders who want to draw the workers over
to the side of Roosevelt and by its attacks on the Republican Party as
the only =91real, direct agency=92 of fascism and war, it helps
Roosevelt=94. (Ibid.)
This analysis naturally led Trotsky to confirm that the entry into the
Socialist Party had been correct; that party had just broken from its
ultra-right wing and had seen new tendencies entering it, which
expressed even partially the radicalisation of the working class. It
was always in relation to these processes at work that Trotsky tried
to think out how the Trotskyists could link themselves to them. In the
spring of 1937, for example, he warned the American Trotskyist
militants against what he called =93a certain adaptation, an op****tunist
line=94 in the Socialist Party (=93The Danger of Adaptation,=94 May 25,
1937, Oeuvres, Volume 14). He made his point of view clear when he
expressed the opinion that it was necessary =93to get ready to jump over
the remains of the Socialist Party=94, and added:
I am not talking here about our work in the trade unions, especially
in the C.I.O. This in a general way is the most im****tant of the tasks
which await us, but it requires that we be independent, as a condition
for free, courageous activity in strikes and the unions. (=93The
Situation in the Socialist Party and Our Next Tasks,=94 June 1937,
Oeuvres, Volume 14).
It was at this same time that Trotsky began to stress two weaknesses
in the work of the American section. On the one hand, there was the
weakness of its participation in the construction of the Fourth
International. He wrote in a letter to Cannon:
You remember that at the last conference Shachtman was chosen as a
member of the Executive Committee [of the movement for the Fourth
International]. The American section has never participated in the
work of the International Secretariat and you hardly reply to the
letters from Europe. This has led in Europe to an atmosphere of doubt,
even of suspicion about the American section.=85 To ensure the success
of the Conference [to found the Fourth International], it is
absolutely necessary that the American section take part in all the
preparatory work starting today. There must be financial sup****t,
however modest, on its part. (=93Some Suggestions,=94 September 11, 1937,
Oeuvres, Vol. 14)
There is in this passage a warning against any spirit of a sect, any
temptation to regard the American organisation as the sole proprietor
of the revealed truth, turning its back on the search for the
transition in the construction of the party.
The Struggle for a Labor Party
This preoccupation was to become more and more essential in the eyes
of Trotsky, to the degree that the necessity to struggle for a Labor
Party was to become clearer. He opened this perspective cautiously at
the beginning, when he wrote:
The m***** of the workers and perhaps of the farmers will, it seems to
me, seek a new political orientation under the successive blows.=85The
crisis will without doubt strengthen all the tendencies towards an
independent Labor Party. The attitude of John L. Lewis is completely
symptomatic in this connection. To be sure, we do not have to change
our principled position about a Labor Party, but this general
conception, which we have expressed and defended in our press many
times can become insufficient. A current in favour of a Labor Party
can for a whole period absorb all the progressive and semi-
revolutionary tendencies in the proletariat. In these conditions, the
collapse of the Communist Party can mean that it dissolves itself into
the Labor Party. We cannot, and naturally do not wish to remain apart.
This does not mean that we shall necessarily enter a labor party, or
that we shall prepare for such a possibility or that we shall begin to
fight for it. That would be pure quixotry. A Labor Party would
naturally be based in the trade unions, particularly in the C.I.O. Our
preparation for this perspective can and should consist now in a
systematic effort to penetrate into the interior of the trade unions
and take part in mass work. (=93The Recession in the United States and
the New Orientation=94, October 2, 1937, Oeuvres, Volume 15)
Trotsky=92s reservations with regard to the slogan of the Labor Party
came from the fact that, in the preceding period, the perspective of a
Farmer-Labor Party had periodically been raised by the Stalinists and
certain elements of the Social-Democracy and would have had the
content of an American form of Popular Front, as Trotsky explained on
many occasions. But what Trotsky described as the new element (namely
the radicalisation in the C.I.O. and hence the search by a layer of
the trade union leader****p for an independent political orientation)
and, on the other hand, the collapse of the Stalinist Party, opened up
the possibility, as he said, that such a Labor Party could for a
period absorb the progressive and semi-revolutionary tendencies in the
proletariat. Hence the need to seek a place prudently in this
perspective, and to prepare first of all and above all for it by mass
work and implantation in the trade union organisations.
At this stage, Trotsky did not exclude that a Labor Party could assume
the functions of a Popular Front in the United States , but it would
be in a special relation****p, which he explained in the following way:
In the United States, the Popular Front has taken the form of
Rooseveltism, that is, the vote of the radicals, the Socialists and
the Communists for Roosevelt. But the new crisis is going to deal
Rooseveltism a blow like that which the last crisis dealt to
Hooverism. What will take the place of the Popular Front of Roosevelt?
Not an immediate polarisation of the extremes as in France, I think.
The American political system has democratic =91reserves,=92 which have
already been used up in France. The most im****tant is the possibility
of a Labor Party being constructed under the aegis of La Guardia,
Green plus Lewis, or probably plus a more advanced variation, that of
Lewis plus Browder. In this sense, the crisis in the United States can
mean, not the end of the Popular Front, but its realisation on the
left and we cannot underestimate this variant. (=93To Prepare the
International Conference,=94 October 20, 1937, Oeuvres, Volume 15)
I think it is im****tant to include Trotsky=92s remark about the greater
=93democratic reserves=94 in the United States than in France at this time
and, therefore, about the possible stage to be considered of a Labor
Party as =93a realisation on the left of the Popular Front=94. Let us
emphasise that this realisation on the left does not mean idealising
such a Labor Party. The hypothesis that such a Labor Party could be
constructed under the aegis of La Guardia=97who, after all, was mayor of
New York and a Republican and who was trying to put together an
alliance against the Democrats with the =93progressives=94 in his party=97
found its manifestation in the sup****t of the trade unions and in the
American Labor Party in New York.
In the same way, the hypothesis of the =93Green plus Lewis=94 combination
(that is, the leader of the A.F. of L. plus that of the C.I.O.) or
perhaps that of =93Lewis plus Browder=94 (that is, the leader of the
C.I.O. plus that of the Communist Party) clearly shows that, for
Trotsky, the search for the transition is the search for forward
steps, however limited they may be, on the road of the break with the
bourgeoisie. In particular, Trotsky did not exclude that one of the
forms that this might adopt would be the break of the bureaucratic and
completely corrupt leaders of the A.F.L. or C.I.O. or of Stalinist
leaders from their traditional sup****t for the Democratic Party.
The axis of the Labor Party was rapidly to become a central question
in Trotsky=92s analysis. This elaboration took place always in relation
to implantation in the trade unions, and, in particular, to the need
to devote great stress to what happens in the C.I.O. This is a
question to which, in several letters, he emphasises that the American
sup****ters of the Fourth International are paying insufficient
attention.
In 1938, Trotsky was to have many discussions on the question of the
Labor Party with the leaders of the SWP. At the beginning, it has to
be pointed out, the leader most open to the perspective of progress in
this direction was Cannon, even though he showed a certain number of
reservations about the attitude which the Trotskyists should take in
the unions in relation to the Labor Non-Partisan League (LNPL), which
presented itself as being an initiative toward independent political
action by the unions, led especially by John L. Lewis and the leader
of the Printers=92 Union in the A.F.L. Shachtman and others showed
themselves more than hostile to this perspective. In the discussion
which opened in 1938, Trotsky reviewed the history of the debate among
the American Trotskyists. He said:
When the Communist League of America studied this question for the
first time seven or eight years ago, whether we were going to be for a
Labor Party or not, whether we were going to be taking an initiative
on this point, the general feeling at the time was not to do it, and
this was quite correct. The perspective of development was not clear.
I think that the majority of us hoped that our organisation would
develop more quickly, and, from another angle, I do not think that
anyone in our ranks during this period foresaw the appearance of the
C.I.O. at the speed and with the power which happened. In our
perspective, we have over-estimated the possibility of development of
our party at the expense of the Stalinists, on the one hand, and, on
the other, we did not see this powerful trade union movement and rapid
decline of American capitalism. (=93Discussions on the Labor Party,=94
March 21, 1938, Oeuvres, Volume 17)
Trotsky pointed out that the perspective at that time was changed with
the development of the workers=92 strikes and the appearance of the
C.I.O. with its 3 million members. He put the point clearly:
Are we for the creation of a reformist Labor Party? No! Are we for a
policy which would give to the trade unions the possibility of
throwing their weight into the balance? Yes! It could become a
reformist party, that depends on the development. Here the question of
programme is posed, as I pointed out yesterday, and I am going to
emphasise it today. We must have a programme of transitional demands,
the most advanced of which is the demand for the workers and farmers=92
government. (Ibid.)
This means that Trotsky saw the struggle for the Labor Party in the
trade unions as a struggle connected with defining and working out the
programme necessary for such a Labor Party. On that line, Trotsky
believed that it was necessary=97unreservedly=97to sup****t the movement
toward independent political action which was expressing itself in the
trade unions. To the question which Cannon posed: =93Are we proposing to
the trade unions that they should sup****t Labor=92s Non-Partisan
League?=94, he replied:
Yes. I think so. Naturally, we shall take our first step so as to
ac***ulate experience in practical work and not get ourselves involved
in abstract formulae, but rather develop a concrete programme of
action and of demands in the sense that the transitional programme
emerges in the conditions of capitalism today and that it leads
directly beyond the limits of capitalism. (Ibid.)
The struggle for the Labor Party excludes any dissolution of the
Trotskyist organisation:
The dissolution of our organisation is absolutely excluded. We show
clearly that we have organisation, our press, etc. Comrade Dunne says
that we cannot yet call on the trade unions to sup****t the SWP. Why?
Because we are too weak. We cannot say to the workers: =91Wait until we
become more influential and more powerful=92; before we intervene in the
movement as it is. (Ibid.)
Then Trotsky answered two objections. He replied to Shachtman, who saw
in the proposed orientation a movement towards a reformist Labor
Party:
What exists in the United States exists everywhere in the world, that
is, this dispro****tion between the objective factors and the
subjective factors. It has never been as sharp as now. We have in the
United States a movement of the m***** to overcome this dispro****tion,
a movement which goes from Green to Lewis, from Walter to La Guardia;
the problem is to overcome this fundamental contradiction.
The Communist Party plays in the United States the same role as in
France, but on a more modest scale. Rooseveltism here replaces the
Popular Frontism in France. In these conditions, our party has to
recognise this contradiction and help the workers to overcome it. What
are our tasks? The strategic tasks consist of helping the m***** to
adapt their political and psychological thinking to the objective
situation, to overcome the traditional prejudices of the American
workers, to adapt their state of mind to the objective situation of
the social crisis of the whole system. In this situation, and taking
into consideration our limited experience, then taking into
consideration the creation of the C.I.O., the succession of strikes
etc., we have been quite correct to be more optimistic and more
aggressive in our strategy, and to put forward slogans which do not
form part of the vocabulary of the American working class.
(=93Discussion to Summarise on Transitional Demands=94, March 23, 1938,
Oeuvres, volume 17.)
At the same period, Trotsky wrote:
The question of the Labor Party has never been a question of principle
for the Marxist revolutionaries. We have always started from the
concrete political situation and the tendencies of its development.
Some years before the crisis of 1929 and even later when the C.I.O.
appeared, we could hope that the revolutionary party, that is, the
Bolshevik Party, could develop in the United States in parallel with
the radicalisation of the working class and perhaps succeed in
becoming head of it. In these conditions, it would have been absurd to
make abstract propaganda in favour of a Labor Party, the existence of
which had not yet been announced. Since then, none the less, the
situation has radically changed and we would have no excuse for
ignoring the fact. The trade unions which are developing powerfully in
the conditions of the deepening of the crisis of capitalism will
thrust themselves forward all the more irresistibly on the road of
political struggle and therefore on that of the crystallisation of a
Labor Party. If the official leaders of the unions, despite the
imperious call of the situation and of the growing pressure of the
m*****, preserve a reserved position on the question of a Labor Party,
this is just because the depth of the social crisis of bourgeois
society now gives the Labor Party question now infinitely greater
sharpness than in the preceding periods.
None the less, we can forecast with sufficient confidence that the
resistance of the bureaucracy will be broken. The movement in favour
of a Labor Party will continue to grow. A revolutionary organisation
which had a negative position, or which stood back from it and waited
to see what would happen, would doom itself to isolation and sectarian
degeneration. The Socialist Workers Party, a section of the Fourth
International, clearly understands the fact that, for unfavourable
historical reasons, its own development has lagged much behind the
radicalisation of broad layers of the American proletariat, and that
it is precisely for that reason that the creation of a Labor Party is
placed on the agenda by the whole course of development. (=93The Problem
of the Labor party=94, April 1938, Oeuvres, volume 17.)
When and how the Labor Party will be formed, what stages and what
splits it will have to go through, history will determine. When the
SWP defends the Labor Party against the attacks of the bourgeoisie, it
does not wish to take upon itself the responsibility for this party.
The SWP maintains a critical attitude towards the Labor Party at every
stage of its development. It sup****ts the progressive tendencies
against the reactionary tendencies and at the same time pitilessly
criticises the two-faced character of these progressive tendencies.
For the SWP, the Labor Party should become on the one hand a field for
recruiting revolutionary elements, and on the other hand a
transmission belt for influencing ever wider circles of workers. By
its very nature, the Labor Party cannot preserve its progressive
significance for more than a relatively short period of transition.
The subsequent aggravation of the revolutionary situation will
inevitably lead to the shell of the Labor Party being broken and will
permit the Socialist Workers Party to rally the revolutionary vanguard
of the American proletariat round the banner of the Fourth
International. (Ibid.)
We shall return later to the parallel which can be established with
the situation today; in particular whether it is correct that the
Labor Party can preserve its progressive significance only for a
relatively short transition period. It will be necessary for us to
appraise the situation today, the consequences of the collapse of
Stalinism, of the conservative character of the leaders of the
American trade unions=97and in addition of the crisis of the SWP. Today
the development necessarily will adopt the way forward of such a Labor
Party, as Trotsky pointed to it, but with necessarily different speed,
to be a field of recruitment and a transmission belt to influence ever
wider circles of workers. The aim being effectively to gather the
revolutionary vanguard of the American proletariat round the banner,
that is to say, the programme.
Trotsky regarded the Labor Party question as corresponding to =93a
specifically American situation=94 (=93The Americans at the conference=94,
May 25, 1938, Oeuvres, volume 17). He thought fit to refer continually
to it in the discussion, to overcome the hesitation of the American
organisation on the necessity of the Labor Party. He replied to one
objection, an early one, according to which nothing proved that there
was a general desire for such a party:
I cannot appreciate whether there exists a desire for a Labor Party,
because I have neither personal observation nor personal information,
but it does not seem to me that the degree to which the leaders or the
rank and file of the unions are disposed or inclined to form such a
party is a decisive question.=85We cannot measure the state of mind
otherwise than in action if the slogan is placed on the agenda.
But what we can say is that the objective situation is absolutely
determinant. The trade unions as trade unions can only have defensive
action and lose members as the crisis worsens and unemployment grows.
Their funds fall while the tasks which they have to carry out with
these ever-dimini****ng resources grow greater. This is a fact which no
one can change.=85I say, in connection with this what I have already
said about the programme of transitional demands as a whole. The
problem is not the state of mind of the m*****, but the objective
situation. Our task is to confront the backward material of the m*****
with the tasks which are determined by the objective facts and not by
their psychology. It is the same for the particular question of the
Labor Party. If the class struggle is not crushed, if it does not give
place to demoralisation, then the movement will find a new channel,
and this channel will be political; this is the fundamental argument
for this slogan. (=93Discussion on the Labor Party=94, May 31, 1938,
Oeuvres, volume 17).
Trotsky went on:
What does it mean, that we are certain that the working class and the
trade unions are going to cling to the slogan of the Labor Party? No!
We are not certain that the working people will cling to this slogan.
We are starting a struggle, but we are not certain of victory. We can
say that our slogan corresponds to the objective situation, which the
best elements will understand and that the more backward, who will not
understand it, will discredit themselves.=85The necessity for a workers=92
political party is given by the objective conditions, but our party is
too small and lacks the authority to recruit the working people in its
own ranks. This is why we say to the workers, to the m*****: =93You must
have a party.=94 But we cannot tell them then and there to join our
party. In a mass meeting, 500 will agree that a Labor Party is
necessary, but only five will agree to join our party, which shows
that the Labor Party slogan is a slogan for agitation, while the
second is for the vanguard.
Should we use the two slogans or only one? I say, use both! The
former, for an independent Labor Party, prepares the arena for our own
party, it helps the workers, it prepares them to go forward, it opens
the road for our party, such is the meaning of this slogan.=85We have to
show the workers what this party has to be, an independent party, not
for Roosevelt or La Follette, a machine for the workers themselves,
this is why we must have our own candidates on the electoral
field.=94 (Ibid.)
Trotsky added: =93The proposal for a Labor Party does not form part of
the programme of transitional demands: it forms a special
proposition.=94 (Ibid.)
He went on: =93To the question, in the trade union, do we defend a Labor
Party and vote =91for=92?=94 He answered: =93Why not?=94
In the case of the trade unions, when the question is raised, I speak
and say that the necessity for a Labor Party is completely proved by
every event. It has been shown that economic action does not suffice,
that we need political action. In a trade union, I shall say that what
counts is the content of the Labor Party and that is why I reserve my
right to speak about its programme, but I shall vote =93for=94. (Ibid.)
We have seen that in Trotsky=92s mind the Labor Party perspective was
directly linked, at one and the same time, to the process of
radicalisation in the working class and the appearance of the C.I.O.,
and to the development of the economic and social crisis in the United
States itself. In 1938, when the premises for an apparent recovery in
the American economy were being outlined, Trotsky was led to question
himself about the validity of the Labor Party slogan, in a situation
which would no longer be marked by a crisis of imminent collapse of
American capitalism:
To be sure, the C.I.O., in a new period of prosperity, would have a
new possibility of developing. In this sense, we may suppose that the
improvement in the state of the economy would defer the question of
the Labor Party until later. Not that it would lose its propaganda
im****tance, but it would lose its immediate relevance. Therefore we
can prepare the progressive elements for this idea and be ready at the
approach of the crisis which will not be long in coming. (=93First
Discussion on the Labor Party=94, July 20, 1938, Oeuvres, volume 18.)
But Trotsky added:
A new recovery would mean that the definitive crisis, the definitive
conflicts, are postponed for several years, despite sharp conflicts
during the rise itself. We have the greatest interest in gaining more
time, because we are weak and the workers in the United States are not
ready. But even a fresh revival would allow us only very, very little
time=97the dispro****tion between the mentality and the methods of the
American workers in the social crisis, this dispro****tion is
terrifying. None the less, I have the impression that we must give
some concrete examples of success and not restrict ourselves to good
theoretical advice. (Ibid.)
We have there a very im****tant element in Trotsky=92s method of thinking
about the Labor Party, to which the SWP throughout its history, and a
fortiori Socialist Action, have substantially turned their backs. To
be sure, says Trotsky, in a period of recovery of economic prosperity,
in which the factors of crisis would be less acute, the question of
the Labor party could take on a more propagandist character. He added,
however, that this must not prevent us from preparing the progressive
elements for this idea, because the crisis will not be long in coming.
But he also added something else: Even during a period of economic
prosperity in which, as a result, the points of sup****t would be less
obvious and less apparent to concretise the perspective of the Labor
Party, it is im****tant to have =93concrete examples of success and not
to confine ourselves to good theoretical advice,=94 because even in a
situation like that, we shall have little, little time, at any rate if
we relate this to what he wrote about the dispro****tion between the
thinking of the American workers and the perspectives of the social
crisis.
We have an im****tant element there. The leaders of Socialist Action
have at all times advanced two arguments against any proposal to
concretise the struggle for the Labor Party. On the one hand, they
say, we have too small, too weak a group numerically to be able to
harness ourselves to this task. But, above all, they invoke the
objective situation, that is to say, the slow rhythms of development
of the economic, social and political situation, the backwardness of
the American working class, to justify their argument that no concrete
initiative, however partial, could be taken on the territory of the
struggle for the Labor Party.
This attitude on the part of the leaders of Socialist Action was
nothing but the theoretical expression, pushed to its extreme, of the
consistent policy of the SWP over decades. And, as we can see, it is
the opposite of Trotsky=92s method; even the backwardness of the
American working class, even the slower rhythms of its radicalisation,
even the small size of its organisation, do not in any way reduce the
central, decisive character of winning successes=97let us put it another
way, partial realisations=97which make it possible to prepare the
vanguard for its tasks in the crisis which lies ahead.
There is a fundamental difference between the method of Trotsky and
that of the leaders of Socialist Action and what formerly was the
method of the SWP to a large extent. This difference is concentrated
on the question of objectivism. At no time did Trotsky base the
possibility for the Fourth International to undertake the forms of
regroupment, even limited ones, on the road to the construction of the
Labor Party (that is, of the solution of the crisis of humanity, which
is the crisis of the revolutionary leader****p of the proletariat)
exclusively on a change in the objective conditions.
We know that the orientation towards the Labor Party immediately
aroused great opposition in the SWP. A large majority of the youth in
the SWP and others likewise polemicised in the internal bulletins in
1938 against the perspective which Trotsky opened. Art Preis, a
Trotskyist militant and the historian of the C.I.O., wrote in his
book, Labor=92s Giant Step:
The Labor Non-Partisan League was presented at the time of its
formation as a step towards workers=92 independent political action. Its
principal purpose was, however, completely the opposite. It was
brought into existence to be a bridge for diverting from independent
political action hundreds of thousands of trade unionists who
habitually voted socialist or communist and who at that period were
demanding a Labor Party.
What is significant in this method is that, instead of finding sup****t
on the contradiction which existed between the claim of the LNPL that
it was opening the road to independent political action and the
orientation of the Stalinist leaders, who did not want to open up this
perspective, instead of utilising this contradiction, Preis rejected
out of hand the LNPL as simply an obstacle to any movement towards the
Labor Party.
Trotsky=92s method was completely the opposite. He tried in the
discussion with the leaders of the SWP to show that it was necessary
to relate to the ambiguous regroupments which announced that a Labor
Party was necessary=97regroupments that were very closely tied up with
the Stalinists and had a Popular Front nature=97and to play upon and
utilise this contradiction, especially in the trade union movement, to
promote an effective movement towards the Labor Party. In his polemic
against the opposition (which was also a polemic against the
reservations of the SWP leader****p), he wrote:
To sum up the attitude of the opposition, it presents the Labor Party
as a substitute for the SWP and as a surrender of our independence. To
the degree that our experience with the Labor Party continues, they
are not ready to accept this experience, nor the lessons which flow
from it. For example, the experience of Minneapolis, with our
militants in the trade unions, already linked with the Farmer-Labor
Party. What should they do? Should they decline to be delegates to the
Farmer-Labor Party? Should we isolate ourselves in the trade union? We
concluded that we could not. Nor could we isolate ourselves from the
experience in Minneapolis, where we had the possibility of having
delegates to the congress of the Labor Party. If we had had a correct
orientation earlier towards the Labor Party, we would have been able
to carry on a great campaign of agitation, to settle accounts with the
Stalinists since they did not even push their own organisation, the
LNPL, forward. They were in the process of completely dissolving it in
New Jersey.
Why did they do that in New Jersey? This, precisely, was a place where
they could not stand a Popular Front candidate. Here, if the
Stalinists had entered into some kind of campaign for a Labor Party,
they would have been obliged to present independent candidates and to
force them to adopt some kind of genuine programme against fascism.
They would not have known how to get out of this. This precisely is
why they were against it. They could not put on foot any kind of
Popular Front. We should have been ready to emphasise all that, when
the delegates of the unions met, the delegates of sixty unions
altogether. We were left behind, and we must recognise it.=94 (=93Second
Discussion on the Labor Party in U.S.A., July 23, 1938, Oeuvres,
volume 18.)
Trotsky went on to analyse the strategic character of the struggle for
the Labor Party in the United States. He explained:
The most im****tant fact that we must emphasise is the profound
difference in relation to the situation of the working class in Europe
which exists in America. In Europe the question of a party for the
workers is regarded as a necessity. It is common ground for the
vanguard of the working class and for a broad layer of the m*****
themselves. In the United States the situation is completely
different. In France, political agitation consists of the Communist
Party trying to win the workers or of the Socialist Party trying to
win the workers, and every conscious or half-conscious worker is
confronted with a choice.=85In the United States, the first step in
political education is that the working class needs a party, its own
party. You may say that this first step ought to have been taken five
or ten years ago. Yes, theoretically, that is true. But, to the extent
that the working people were more or less satisfied with the trade
union apparatus or even lived without it, propaganda in favour of a
workers=92 party remained more or less theoretical and abstract, and
coincided with the propaganda of certain centrist and Communist
groups, etc.
Now this situation has changed.=85 Agitation for a party of the working
class is now no longer abstract, but, on the contrary, a very concrete
step in the forward march of the workers organised in the trade
unions, in the first place and of those who are not organised at all.
In the second place, it is a completely concrete task, determined by
the economic and social conditions. It would be absurd for us to say
that, because a new party is being born out of the political
unification of the trade unions, this will necessarily be op****tunist.
We are not going to appeal to the workers to take this step in the
same way as in other countries. Of course, if we had a choice in
reality between a reformist party and a revolutionary party, we would
immediately show that our place is in the latter. But a party is
absolutely necessary. This for us is the only road in this situation.
To say that we are going to combat op****tunism as we shall, of course,
combat op****tunism today and tomorrow, especially if the party of the
working class has been organised, by checking a progressive step which
can give rise to op****tunism, is a completely reactionary policy;
sectarianism often is reactionary because it places itself in
opposition to the necessary action of the working class.
We can imagine, under a schematic form, three kinds of Labor Party in
the United States in the coming period. The first type, a loose,
op****tunist and confused party; the second possibility, an op****tunist
but fairly centralised party, led by fakers and careerists; the third
possibility is a centralised revolutionary party. =93We do not expect to
have a clear, pure type. There will be different stages, different
combinations, different parties, different types of Labor Parties. But
in order to present the situation and our tasks more clearly, we can
consider these three types.
If the party is loose enough in its organisation to let us enter it,
it would be stupid not to enter. If we enter with the possibility of
working there as a party, it will be because the Labor Party is an
op****tunist party with fairly slack connections. The fact that such
party accepts us signifies in itself that the op****tunists are not
strong enough to keep us out. That, in a certain way, signifies
favourable conditions for us.=85And then, it can be a Labor Party in a
less critical situation, a less disturbed environment, calmer, quieter
conditions, with the predominance of reactionary conservative leaders,
with a more or less centralised apparatus, which will exclude us as a
party. In that case, we would, of course, continue to exist as a party
outside such an op****tunist party, and we would consider only the
possibility of penetrating such a party, but as a party we would
remain outside such a centralised, op****tunist party.
If we become the dominant tendency in the Labor Party, a revolutionary
tendency with leaders who are with us and ideas which are ours, then
we would become sup****ters of centralising this party with its loose
organisational linkages, we would insist that the workers eliminate
the fakers, etc. This is the third type, the third stage of the
evolution, the stage in which our party dissolves itself in this Labor
Party, in a way which determines the character of this Labor Party. At
the first stage, we say: =93Working people, you need your own party.
(Ibid.)
Labor Party: The Question of the Power and the Independence of the
Working Class
In Trotsky=92s mind, the question of the Labor Party is directly bound
up with that of the struggle for power. He explained, in a discussion
with a trade union leader:
The first step is clear. All the trade unions must come together to
create their Labor party. Not a party controlled by Roosevelt or La
Guardia, which would have nothing but the name of Labor about it, but
a genuinely independent political organisation of the working class.
Only such a party can attract to itself the ruined farmers, the small
artisans, the small shopkeepers.
But in order to realise this task, it is necessary to continue to
fight mercilessly against the banks, the trusts, the monopolies, and
their political agents, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
The role of the Labor Party is to take power into its hands, complete
power, and to restore the economy to order. This pre-supposes
organising the whole national economy according to a rational plan,
that is, a plan which has its aim not to raise the profits of a
handful of exploiters, not to defend the profits of a handful of
exploiters, but to protect the material and moral interests of
130,000,000 people. (=93The Trade Unions and the Social Crisis in the
United States, September 29, 1938, Oeuvres, volume 19.)
In the course of the year 1938, the leader****p of the SWP organised an
internal discussion on the question of the Labor Party. This
discussion closed with a referendum among the members of the SWP.
Trotsky wrote as follows to James P. Cannon on this subject: =93The
referendum does not seem to me to have been a very happy invention.
The discussion seems to have given rise to some difficulty in the
party. You can only surmount all that by action. It seems to me that
it is time to show directly to the party how we must act on this
question. I have had here two long discussions with an organiser of
the Ladies=92 Garment Workers Union, and I have summarised our
discussion in an article which does its best to place the question on
its true political level.
It is now being translated, and they will send it to you at the same
time as this letter. But it is quite clear that an article is nothing
if the party does not begin serious work in the unions with the slogan
that the workers must take the state into their hands and that, for
that purpose, they need their own independent Labor Party.
An energetic step in this direction would certainly dissipate all the
misunderstandings and discontents and would drive the party forward.
On this question, as on the others, it is absolutely necessary to give
to our propaganda and agitation a more concentrated and systematic
character. For example, it is necessary to direct all the local
committees to present within a month to the national committee a brief
re****t on their links to the unions, the possibility of work in the
unions and especially agitation in the unions in favor of an
independent Labor Party.
The danger is that the question of the Labor Party becomes a purely
abstract one. The basis of our activity is the unions. The question of
the Labor Party can take on flesh and blood only to the extent that we
are rooted in the unions. A serious beginning of our work in the
unions has led us to the slogan of Labor Party. We must now use it so
that we can root the party still more deeply in the unions. (=93Problems
of the SWP=94, October 5, 1938, Oeuvres, volume 19.)
There can be no disputing that in this letter Trotsky is emphasising
not the opposition to the Labor Party in the SWP, but what seemed to
him to be the difficulty of the leader****p itself in connection with
the Labor Party. To be sure, the leader****p did come out in favour of
a Labor Party in the referendum which it organised, but Trotsky warned
against the growing tendency to make the Labor Party an abstraction,
an academic discussion. He insisted on the necessity for energetic,
practical steps in that direction. There can be no doubt that
Trotsky=92s criticism of Cannon raised real problems. Between the end of
1938 and the year 1940 hardly anything significant was done on the
road to the Labor Party. We shall return to this.
On this point, it is significant to examine the way in which James P.
Cannon addressed the question of the Labor Party in his evidence at
the Minneapolis trial. Let us repeat, the defence by Cannon in this
trial, published under the title Socialism on Trial, is a model both
of defending and of illustrating a genuinely internationalist position
in the difficult situation of the early stages of an imperialist war
and, at the same time, of simply and pedagogically explaining the
fundamental principles of Marxism.
Let us repeat, also, that Socialism on Trial remains one of the
strongest aspects of the contribution of Cannon and the SWP
leader****p, of what they brought to the construction of the Fourth
International. But we cannot fail to mention that one of the
weaknesses of the defence presented at the Minneapolis Trial lies
precisely in this question of the Labor Party. It would be stupid to
blame Cannon and the SWP leader****p for not having made this question
the centre of their political activity during the imperialist war. It
is certain that during this period the practical possibilities of
going forward towards forming a Labor Party were more than reduced and
even non-existent. But we know that, under the judge=92s questions,
Cannon was led to explain the history of the SWP before the outbreak
of the imperialist war and to explain the general principles of the
policy of the SWP.
Cannon himself, moreover, laid stress on the situation in which his
statement was being made in his reply to the polemics by Munis in May
1942: =93What were the specific tasks, what were the techniques of
propaganda which were imposed on us in this situation? It seems to us
that the reply to this is evident. Our job was to obtain the widest
audience for our ideas from the platform which the trial offered us.
These ideas had themselves to be simplified as much as possible, so as
to be accessible to working people and required to be illustrated as
much as possible by familiar examples drawn from American history.
We had to address the working people, not in a general way, nor an
abstract way, but as they exist in reality in the United States,
during that year 1941. We had to recognise that the forms of democracy
and of the legality of the party greatly facilitate this propaganda
work and must not be underestimated. It was not our job to make the
work of the attorney-general easier, but on the contrary, to make it
more difficult, and this had to be done in such a way as did not lead
us to renouncing our principles. Such were the considerations which
guided our work in this trial. (=93A Reply=94, by James P. Cannon,
published in Socialism on Trial)
Within a framework of method which is perfectly correct, within which
Cannon defended the principles in a situation which was imposed upon
him, in what way was he led to approach the perspective of the Labor
Party? In the first case, he stated, in reply to a question from the
judge about the history of the SWP, that one of the motives for the
break from the Socialist Party during the entrist period was precisely
the question of the sup****t which the Socialist Party gave to the La
Guardia candidature in New York. He explained:
We opposed this sup****t, on the basis of the fact that it was a
violation of socialist principles to sup****t a candidate of a
capitalist party. La Guardia was, in fact, the candidate of the
Republican and the Fusion parties and equally of the Labor Party.
(Socialism on Trial, p.20.)
There we have, we see, an expression which differs slightly from the
way in which Trotsky approached the question, but that is not the
essential thing. When Cannon was asked about what was called the
modification of principle of the SWP, a declaration of principle which
had been adopted in January 1938 and suspended by a special congress
of the SWP in December 1940, he explained:
I would say that the principal reason for this modification was the
adoption by Congress of the law known as the Voorhees act, which
struck at parties belonging to international organisations. This was
the principal reason. Other, subsidiary reasons intervened, namely
that during the same period the party had changed its position on the
question of the Labor Party.
And, in reply to the question, =93Can you summarise for us the nature of
the change on the question of the Labor Party?=94, Cannon said:
It concerned a change, to an opposite direction, at the moment when we
adopted the declaration [La V=E9rit=E9/The Truth, January 1938]. We had
rejected sup****t for proposals directed towards organising a Labor
Party, that is, a party based on the trade unions. But during the
summer of 1938, we changed our position and reached the conclusion
that this movement could have more progressive advantages than
disadvantages.
He replied to a question from the judge about the method used to
prepare for this change:
The national committee of the SWP adopted a resolution which made
public the fact that it was changing its position. This resolution was
sent to the members of the party in the internal bulletin, and a
discussion period, of sixty days I believe, was opened, in which
everyone could express their opinion for or against the change of
position. This was discussed very widely in the party. In fact, not
all the members of the national committee were in agreement with this
change of position. At the end of the discussion period, a referendum
was organised among the members and a majority voted in favour of the
amended resolution.
Except for this historical recollection, it is significant that in the
hundred-odd pages of Socialism on Trial Cannon does not think it
necessary to mention the orientation towards the Labor Party, which
confirms in a certain way that during this pre-war period it retained
for the SWP the abstract, academic character against which Trotsky had
warned.
Cannon replied as follows to the questions of the judge in an exchange
on the electoral policy of the SWP. The question which was put ran:
=93What is the attitude of the party towards elections?=94 Cannon replied:
=93Our party stands candidates wherever it is able to take part in
elections. We wage extremely energetic campaigns during these
elections and in general to the best of our capacity, within the
limits which our resources impose on us, we take part in electoral
campaigns.=94 (He then quoted a certain number of electoral campaigns in
which the SWP had stood candidates). To the question, =93Is the party
ever sup****ting other candidates?=94, he replied:
Yes. In cases where we have no candidate, it is our policy regularly
to sup****t the candidates of other workers=92 parties or of a Labor or
Farmer-Labor Party. We sup****t them in a critical way, that is, we do
not accept responsibility for their programme, but we vote for them
and we call for votes for them, while we explain that we do not
approve their programme. We sup****t them against the candidates of the
Democratic and Republican Parties.
Cannon gave the example of the sup****t given, for example, to the
candidate of the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, and made clear that
this sup****t had been given =93in every case in which we could not have
candidates of our own party, where we have likewise sup****ted
candidates of the American Labor Party in New York in similar
cir***stances.=94
What seems to me to be significant about this passage is the extremely
restrictive way in which the question of the candidatures is treated.
It is correct to stand candidates, but at the same time the method
analysed by Trotsky (which we have seen in the preceding discussions)
aimed at examining the possibilities to propose that independent
workers=92 candidates be put up, as part of the process of construction
of the Labor Party. And Trotsky emphasised the place which Trotskyists
ought to occupy in this activity. Indeed, the political orientation of
the Trotskyist party in the United States should have been, in this
period and equally after World War Two and still today, formulated in
a slightly different way, namely, that in the strategic struggle for
the Labor Party, we work in all cir***stances to try to ensure real
independent working-class candidatures, as mileposts on the road of
the independent political organisation of the proletariat and as
active participants in these processes on the road of a Labor Party.
That, moreover, in all the cir***stances where this is not possible,
we present SWP candidates within the limits of what is possible.
As we have seen, Cannon approaches these matters in the opposite way.
Candidatures of the SWP everywhere, and, in default, sup****t=97which is
correct in that case=97for all workers=92 candidatures which oppose
Democrat and Republican candidates, even if we do not sup****t their
programme.
But, in a certain way, what disappears here is the transition and, in
particular, the utilisation of the election in the transition. It
would be incorrect to believe that this formulation was due to the
conditions in which Cannon made this declaration: if we examine the
whole subsequent history of the SWP, it has been principally marked,
even exclusively, by a policy of systematically standing candidates in
elections. This had a perfectly justified aspect because it
demonstrated the need for independent workers=92 candidatures by
rejecting the Democrat-Republican alternative. But, apparently, it led
to failing to explore every possibility of struggle based in trade
union organisations for independent workers=92 candidatures. This
characteristic feature in the attitudes of the SWP has reappeared in a
caricatured way in the activity of Socialist Action.
For example, we know that Socialist Action possesses a certain
influence in the trade union movement in California, but has never
fought consistently for independent workers=92 candidatures sup****ted by
sectors of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. that are breaking from the Democratic
Party. The policy of Socialist Action, reproducing the earlier policy
of the SWP, has always consisted of presenting candidates within the
limits of its means, particularly for mayor of San Francisco or other
elective positions in that city.
There is, of course a qualitative threshold between the position of
Socialist Action in 1991 and the way in which Cannon approached the
same question in the Minneapolis Trial in 1941. But there is also a
line of descent, and element of continuity, from one to the other.
About Continuity
What happened at the end of the 1940s and at the beginning of the
1950s is a turning-point in the history of the SWP. It had experienced
a powerful development and made strong implantation in the workers=92
movement, in the trade unions and in particular among Blacks during
World War Two and the years which followed it. Then the SWP suffered
very severe blows, inflicted by the American government and the
bourgeoisie within the framework of McCarthyism.
Today it is difficult to imagine how severe were the blows inflicted
upon it. The systematic persecution of its members in their
workplaces, the involvement of the leaders of the trade union
organisations in the witchhunt was directed at first against the
militants of the Communist Party of the United States and then very
widely at the militants of the SWP.
They were driven out of the workplaces, lost their jobs, politically
persecuted, isolated by the trade union apparatus itself. The SWP
experienced an extremely difficult situation. In this situation, it is
clear that the development of Pabloism on the scale of the Fourth
International had its echo in the development of the Cochran current,
the =93Cochranites,=94 within the SWP.
The Cochranites had represented a sector implanted in the working
class and im****tant positions in the trade union movement. They had
the characteristic that, under the pressure of the extremely difficult
conditions imposed by McCarthyism at the beginning of the 1950s, they
tended to express theoretically the necessity to operate a retreat in
the building of the party. For example, they opposed standing
candidates in elections, to the extent that this required going to
seek signatures to be able to stand candidatures. They believed that
the working class was at that stage too reactionary for any
candidature to have the slightest interest, just as they believed it
to be impossible to have a mass campaign to sell The Militant and get
subscriptions for the paper.
It cannot be disputed that this Cochranite faction exerted an
im****tant pressure internally on the SWP, and that it naturally fell
in with the Pabloite offensive at the level of the Fourth
International. It is im****tant to stress this in order to appreciate
several aspects of the way in which the leader****p of the SWP behaved
in this crisis and aspects which were to have im****tance in what
followed.
The first element to be brought out is the way in which the leader****p
of the SWP reacted to the crisis of the Fourth International. As we
know, the leader****p of the SWP remained deaf to the appeals of the
French section, when the latter was excluded by Pablo because it
refused to dissolve itself in the Stalinist apparatus. There are two
elements to be noticed in this attitude on the part of the SWP
leader****p. On the one hand, there are the objective conditions of
political struggle in the United States which led Cannon and the SWP
leader****p to believe that they must concentrate the greatest part of
the resources and their efforts on preserving the party in the United
States, and these objective conditions cannot be disputed.
But, on the other hand, there was the fact that, in order to be able
to preserve the party, there was the illusion that it was possible to
make an agreement with Pablo and that it would be best to close their
eyes to the policy of liquidating the Fourth International which Pablo
was advocating. The SWP leader****p had to wait for the attack of the
Clark/Cochran faction inside the SWP, and the sup****t which Pablo gave
to this current, for the leader****p of the SWP to react.
Cannon did his utmost to separate the struggle against the Cochran
faction in the United States from the struggle against Pablo. At the
national congress of the SWP in July 1952, in answer to a contribution
which had linked the national and the international questions, he
indicated that he did not agree with Pablo=92s formulation about
=93centuries of transition=94 and =93centuries of degenerate workers=92
state=94. But he added:
No more today than yesterday do I appreciate the attempt to put into
opposition to each other two lines of thought in our international
movement: one characterised by Pabloism and the other, for lack of a
better name, as Cannonism. No, I assure you, such a line of
demarcation does not exist. Personally, I admire and appreciate the
work and the thought which comrade Pablo has devoted to the
construction of our international movement. I am not alone. I think
that the whole Fourth International shares this viewpoint, as this has
been demonstrated by the fact that our World Congress, with a
representation larger, I believe, than we ever had before, coming from
the four corners of the earth, found itself to be in fundamental
agreement with him [with Pablo =97Ed.] ...
I regard Pablo as an orthodox Marxist, an orthodox Trotskyist, who
tries to put into application the teachings of Marx and of Trotsky and
to apply them in the new processes which never before appeared in the
world. That is the way in which Pablo has to be regarded, and I do not
like to see personalised attacks on him. (=93Conclusion of the Political
Re****t=94, Congress of the SWP, July 17, 1952, published in Speeches to
the Party)
In the same closing speech, after having emphasised the content of the
disagreements with Pablo always as being on this question of
=93centuries of transition=94, Cannon gave a warning:
All these are questions which we can discuss calmly when we have the
time and we have ceased to fight against the enemies of the Fourth
International, who try to discredit the decisions of the Third World
Congress and try to present Pablo as a Stalinist agent, trying to
transform the Fourth International into a kind of trap for
revolutionary Marxists to lead them back on to the territory of
Stalinism. All that are slanders, all that is a distorted
representation of the facts, and I refuse to give any sup****t whatever
to this offensive, directly or indirectly. (Ibid.)
At the moment when Cannon was speaking in this way, the majority of
the P.C.I. in France had been expelled for several months by Pablo
from the Fourth International. However, for Cannon, Pablo was still
the model of orthodox Trotskyism. At any rate, that is what he
declared. Did he really believe it? A little under a year later,
Cannon was to give another version of the facts. Meanwhile, the crisis
was to have sharpened within the SWP. The Cochranite fraction,
encouraged by Pablo, had engaged in a life and death struggle within
the SWP. Within the framework of these events, Cannon was to give a
new version of the events.
For anyone who wishes to understand what are the strengths and the
weaknesses of =93Cannonism=94, it is essential to re-read the speech
entitled =93Internationalism and the SWP=94, a speech delivered at a
meeting of the majority tendency in New York on May 18, 1953. On that
date the battle was raging within the SWP. It was a factional struggle
which in the following months was to end in flagrant breaches of party
discipline by the Cochranites, which ended with their being
justifiably expelled in the autumn of 1953.
A year and a half had gone by since the French Section had been
bureaucratically excluded from the Fourth International. For the first
time, Cannon spoke in public on this question. How did he do it? The
whole axis of the speech is the struggle against Cochran, against
Cochranism as an expression of an American phenomenon within the SWP.
In passing, he questions Pablo on one matter, that of organisational
methods. On the subject of the French Section, he says:
=85 [D]isagreement appeared in relation to the developments in the
French party. Some months after the World Congress, we heard it said
that there had been a split or a partial split in the P.C.I. The
International Secretariat had intervened, had deposed the majority of
the Central Committee and had appointed a representative of the I.S.
as an impartial chairperson on a parity committee.=85We have absolutely
no sympathy on the political level with the French majority, who in my
opinion are refusing to implement the decisions of the World Congress.
But we ask ourselves the question: how is it going to be possible to
construct an International, if you think it possible in this way to
undermine a leader****p elected by a national section?
This quotation is extremely interesting, because it points to two
things. On the one hand, if we accept that it really was effectively
the position of Cannon and of the SWP leader****p, it is significant
that this position was kept secret for a year and a half and that the
SWP leader****p did not intervene in any way against the exclusion of
the French Section. But, on the other hand, we shall notice the care
with which Cannon excludes all political content from his demarcation
from Pablo. He restates his political disagreement with the majority
of the French P.C.I. He does not in the slightest degree relate
Pablo=92s bureaucratic methods to the political content, the revisionist
liquidationism, of which they were the organisational expression. He
acts purely and simply in the situation to warn Pablo and the I.S. not
to try to intervene in the American organisation.
The whole of Cannon=92s method is given in the following passage from
his speech:
When the situation developed and worsened in France, Renard, one of
the leaders of the French majority, appealed to me in a letter. I did
not reply to this letter for months. I did not see how I could write
on this French question without referring to the organisational
monstrosity, which the International Secretariat had committed.
Cannon=92s admission is honest. He explicitly and deliberately refused
to answer Renard=92s appeal and overlooked the destructive attack on the
French Section.
On the political plane, in the same speech, he justifies his refusal
to combat Pabloism by saying that, in a situation in which there were
attacks on Pablo from the outside, it was not desirable to enter into
open conflict with him inside the Fourth International. In the same
speech, Cannon indicates that a number of the militants of the SWP
have been disoriented by Pablo=92s thesis about =93centuries of
transition=94, and that a number of militants have questioned him and
said: =93What good is it for us to go on fighting to build the party and
to sell the paper if this has to go on for centuries of transition?=94
And Cannon explained: =93These militants were right, but we had decided
not to join this battle in the French manner.=94
There we have what was consistent in Cannon=92s position throughout the
crisis of 1950-53. The position was to delay, to avoid as far as
possible, to try to avoid up to the last minute the political
confrontation with Pablo. Cannon had the illusion that he was going to
be able to preserve the SWP by settling accounts with the Cochran
faction, while in a certain sense letting the crisis of dislocation of
the Fourth International play itself out. Here is the first major
demonstration of a national-Trotskyist point of view. The fate of the
SWP was directly dependent on the fate of the Fourth International.
But Cannon did not know, or did not care, to take that into
consideration at that time.
Cannon replied to the question: =93... whether, in one way or another,
[he] opposed the Third World Congress?=94, in a very significant way in
his speech to the plenum of the national committee of the SWP, at the
end of May 1953 (published in Speeches to the Party). In a long speech
in his defence, he mentions various aspects in order to prove the
contrary: his loyalty to the decisions of the Third Congress, to its
resolutions and to the leader****p of the Fourth International in the
control of Pablo.
Among the six proofs of his loyalty which he advances, he again
mentioned explicitly that the way in which he replied to Renard should
be counted as evidence of loyalty on the part of the SWP leader****p to
the decisions of the Third World Congress. In particular, he pointed
out the following:
What did I say to Daniel Renard? This is what I wrote to him: =91We
judge the policy of the leaders of the International on the basis of
the line which they have worked out in its official do***ents. In the
recent period, there has been discussion about the do***ents of the
Third World Congress and the Tenth Plenum. We see no trace of
revisionism in these do***ents. We believe that these do***ents are
absolutely Trotskyist.=92 That is what I wrote to comrade Renard about
the Third World Congress. Not the reply of a demagogue, taking part in
a factional struggle, but an intervention to help the leader****p of
the International in the struggle inside the French party. And I made
clear that it was the unanimous opinion of the leader****p of the SWP,
that the authors of the quoted do***ents had done a great service to
the movement of the Fourth International.
It was only after the expulsion of the Cochranites in November 1953
that Cannon raised explicitly the responsibility of Pablo in the split
organised by the Cochranites. In his speech to the plenum of the
national committee of November 2-3, 1953, twenty-four hours after the
expulsion of the Cochranites (published in Speeches to the Party),
Cannon explained:
Our break with Pabloism, as we see it clearly today, is concentrated
on one point: the question of the party. What appears clearly today in
our eyes is that we have seen the development of Pabloism in action.
The essence of Pabloite revisionism is to overthrow, to sweep away,
that part of Trotskyism which today is the most vital, the conception
that the crisis of humanity is the crisis of the leader****p of the
workers=92 movement, concentrated in the question of the party.
Pabloism seeks not only to overthrow Trotskyism, it seeks to overthrow
what in Trotskyism comes from what Trotsky learned from Lenin [that
is, the question of the party =97Ed.].
=46rom that moment onwards, Cannon was to undertake a regular and well-
justified critique of the political and organisational content of
Pabloism. But it is astounding to note that this criticism appeared
immediately after the break with the Cochranites. It was the direct
result of it, which is to say that it came in as one element of the
defence of the SWP against the destructive attack of which it was the
object, of the SWP as an American party and, flowing from that, it
came in taking a position at the level of the International, but
always subordinated to the attitude taken up of the viewpoint of the
American SWP.
There we have completely what is at stake for the American
Trotskyists. The problem is to contribute to the struggle for the
reproclamation of the Fourth International by drawing out to the end
the lessons and the balance-sheet of =93Cannonism=94. We should emphasise
that at the very moment of the break with Pablo the leader****p of the
SWP was led to re-evaluate the possibility of struggle for a Labor
Party. It is in his speech at the Sixth Congress of the SWP in
November 1954 that Cannon explained that, in relation to the
witchhunt, to the blows struck at the working class, etc.
=85 [T]here is no prospect, as far as we can judge, if we put aside an
unpredictable explosion, of the workers turning towards a Labor Party
in the next two years. This corresponds to reality, this requires that
we amend our slogan, which was =91Build a Labor Party Now=92, and devote
ourselves to a pedagogical explanation, according to which the workers
should orient themselves towards an independent policy as a class and
construct their own party, but leaving aside the consequences for
immediate activity of such an orientation. Our principal task for the
next two years is to explain patiently the principles of the class
struggle on the political level and to recruit class-conscious
militants to the party. That is the greatest revolutionary task for
our epoch, it is the work of preparing for the future.
And further on:
Our slogan for a Labor Party is at the present time a propaganda
slogan. Taking account of the present situation, it cannot be a slogan
for activity any more than a slogan for agitation for the next period.
It would be necessary to go on to a precise re-evaluation of this turn
by the SWP leader****p at the end of 1954. On the one hand, it was
broadly founded on a real appreciation of the political situation at
that moment, and it is certain that at that precise moment the
struggle for the Labor Party necessarily took on in its essence an
aspect of explanation and propaganda. But, at the same time, the
division, the rigid wall which Cannon erected between what had to do
on the one hand with propaganda for a Labor Party, which he regarded
as being possible, and on the other hand practical activity, played an
im****tant role in the evolution and the drift of the SWP.
In fact, even in the moments when the working class is in retreat or
the moments when there are political persecutions, the tasks which
have to do with propaganda can at every instant even over a limited
area lead on to forms of practical activity, of materialisation of a
transitional approach, even when they are extremely limited.
The French section itself has experienced this, for example, that it
is possible to find materialisations, even though they may be limited,
on a general line which is that of working out the transition in the
construction of the party: the CLADO, the Committees for the Workers=92
Alliance, later the MPPT, but even when we were dealing with areas
limited in time and space, at particular points, they were the
materialisation of the fact that the Trotskyists, even when they were
very few in numbers and in a difficult situation, always seek to pass
from their position of propaganda to the territory of practical
realisation.
When the Cannon leader****p erected a rigid wall separating the
propaganda tasks from the possibilities of practical materialisation,
and that in relation even to the attitude observed in the
International, it encouraged something which later became
theoretically expressed by the leader****p of the SWP over a long
period, and then by Socialist Action.5 This was the idea according to
which, while their tasks are confined to propaganda, the struggle for
the Labor Party is reduced to declaring in principle that the Labor
Party is necessary without any materialisation, any practical
activity.
The corollary of this position was to be the tendency to adaptation to
every form of radicalisation in different sectors. We would need to
study in detail the attitude of the SWP in relation to Malcolm X and
then to the Black Panthers. It is, for example, very clear if you re-
read George Breitmann=92s introductions to Malcolm X=92s books that there
is the combination of two factors: on the one hand and rightly there
is great attention paid to these phenomena of radicalisation among the
North American Blacks, a proper dialogue with Malcolm X or with these
political currents.
But in a more general way, when we re-read the do***ents of the SWP
about Malcolm X, they are marked by an adaptation to the political
positions of Malcolm X. And this for an evident reason. The
renunciation of the practical struggle for a Labor Party led the
leaders of the SWP in the dialogue with Malcolm X not to pose directly
the question of the struggle for a Black Party, linked with the more
general struggle for a Labor Party. This is an objectivist position,
which is powerless to have real influence in the processes of
crystallisation towards a Labor Party, integrating the Black Party as
one particular determinant.
In a more general way, a development would be necessary on the
question of the position of the SWP towards the Black Party. It cannot
be denied, when we return to the body of the discussion of Trotsky
with the leaders of the SWP on this question that, still more than on
the question of the Labor Party, the leader****p of the SWP put up a
lively resistance to the political orientation which Trotsky proposed
and never really assimilated it. This is the reason why, every time
that it found itself confronted by phenomena which permitted it to
open the way to the formation of a Black Party, whether they had to
deal with Malcolm X, or later with the Black Panthers, or at the end
of the 1970=92s when the NBIPP was founded, the SWP always oscillated
between an attitude of op****tunist adaptation and a sectarian policy.
If we review each of these episodes, the line of the SWP never was one
of helping to go as far as possible to the limit in the formation of a
mass Black Party by practical help, while preserving its political
independence, that is to say, linking it to the question of the Labor
Party. Its attitude was either one of pure and simple adaptation, as
towards Malcolm X, or a mixture of adaptation and then sectarian
denunciation, as was the case with the Black Panthers, or an attitude
which we can call =93plucking the game=94, and, finally, a sectarian
attitude. We can see this in their attitude to the NBIPP, in which the
cadres of the SWP in fact tried to take more than their share and
played a part in the process which saw this regroupment break up.
While there were extremely im****tant waves of radicalisation among the
Blacks in the United States, we cannot accept that the policy of the
SWP was a source of help or a point of sup****t for going towards the
formation of a Black Party. To be sure, there are internal do***ents
and political statements by the SWP which pose the question relatively
correctly. Here we may mention the do***ents entitled Freedom Now, or
the reply of Gus Horowitz to Mandel in 1971 on the question of Black
nationalism. These texts should be attentively studied, as well as the
experience of 1979-1980 in the NBIPP. But none the less the fact
remains that, when the SWP in the 1960=92s and at the beginning of the
1970=92s had, with its youth organisation, an organised political force
of over 2,000 members, including its youth organisation, while it had
a not-negligible implantation including moreover in certain sectors of
the Black movement, its orientation never was that of practical
application of a transitional line in party building.
This means that what was already an excessive, dangerous formalisation
in Cannon=92s speech at the 1954 Congress had then become a theoretical
line, a constant feature of the leader****p of the SWP, which never
stopped being repeated including during the 1970=92s: since our
orientation cannot go beyond general propaganda and therefore
propaganda for a Labor Party, the leader****p of the SWP really
believed that it had no responsibility for assisting the independent
regroupment of the class in the Labor Party and in the independent
political expression for the Blacks in the Black Party. And, very
clearly, the axis of a balance-sheet of the strengths and weaknesses
of =93Cannonism=94 should bear on an exact, precise, reasoned evaluation
of the fact that a close link binds the tendency to national-
Trotskyism to its renunciation of the struggle for a workers=92 party in
the United States. For example, it is clear that the refusal to take
up its responsibilities at the level of the Fourth International and
the op****tunist adaptation to the Castro leader****p directly nourished
the unprincipled re-unification of 1963.
Let us take one example, the question of the elections. The SWP has
always defended the correct principle that it was necessary to have
independent workers=92 candidates in elections and has consistently
expressed this orientation in systematically presenting the candidates
of the SWP at every level. To be sure, during the 1950=92s and at the
beginning of the 1960=92s there were few op****tunities to work for
independent workers=92 candidates or independent Black candidates to
declare themselves. None the less, if we are not to re-write history,
it is certain that from the middle 1960s through the 1970s,
op****tunities existed, in relation to the processes which were
developing in the working class and among the Blacks, to work for
groupings presenting independent Black candidates or independent
workers=92 candidates, and that this was never the preoccupation and the
policy of the SWP leader****p.
It is clear that Socialist Action was to offer a caricatured version
of all the characteristics of the SWP on this level, and that its
leader****p has always opposed any attempt to express the orientation
towards a Labor Party in a practical way. In a more general way, it
would be necessary to develop two other aspects. On the one hand the
characteristic which is common to all the national-Trotskyist currents
which have emerged from the crisis of the Fourth International. This
is their renunciation of the struggle for the transition, for the
construction of the workers=92 party, transition towards the
construction of the Fourth International, that is to say, renunciation
of practical application of the strategic orientation of the
Transitional Programme, according to which the crisis of humanity is
reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leader****p of the
proletariat.
In different forms, this is a characteristic common to the SWP, Healy
and Moreno, who all were led to regard their party as the definitive
reply to the question of the reconstruction of a revolutionary
leader****p of the proletariat, who all, in different forms have been
led to a self-proclamatory, sectarian policy, claiming to solve the
crisis of the leader****p of the proletariat within the limits of one
country alone and claiming to solve it by the simple linear growth of
their own organisation. This failure to understand the transition
cannot avoid a failure to understand the meaning of the struggle for
the united front. But it has had the result, as a corollary
consequence, which ought to be studied, that, in =93failing to occupy
the territory=94 of the struggle for the transition, the space has been
left for obstacles to the construction of the independent workers=92
party to develop.
For example, in the United States, it is clear that when there was the
break with the Cochranites, the question of the Labor Party occupied a
central position, from one angle: in the name of the struggle for the
Labor Party, acting fraudulently under this flag, the Cochranites
spoke in favour of the disappearance of the SWP as such. Cannon=92s
defence of the SWP, which was essential, tended to bend the stick in
the other direction. But it could easily have been corrected later on
if the Fourth International had not been destroyed as an international
organisational framework. But the national response of the SWP had the
consequence that, when other op****tunities offered themselves of the
detachment of currents seeking confusedly (and not without links with
the bureaucracy) the road for independent regroupments, the SWP was
always opposed and therefore left the field open to others.
Let us take the example of the current known as Labor Notes. This is a
left wing of the trade union bureaucracy. But it is a left wing which
has the peculiarity that it is structured largely under the influence
of the Shachtmanites. The fact is: Labor Notes could influence a
current of thousands of trade union cadres when it came out, though,
to be sure, in a formal way, organised conferences and issued a
bulletin calling for a Labor Party. It is certain that this territory
was all the more easily occupied by the Shachtmanites because it had
been abandoned by the SWP.
Similarly in a different form, the place occupied by =93Militant=94 on its
op****tunistic line in Britain has been facilitated by the degeneration
of Healy and the way in which he believed that he had definitively
settled the question of the Labour Party. And it is probable that
coming developments in Argentina, for example, of differentiations in
the Peronist bureaucracy and of splits in these currents will reveal
the disastrous results of the policies of Moreno on this point.
Therefore, here is an element on which we should place great emphasis.
=93At the end of the day=94 all of this is the product of the crisis of
the International, and brings us back to our tasks, to the struggle
for the Workers=92 International, to Barcelona, etc.
The other element which we must bring to light is that, since
Socialist Organizer was formed, in its two-months=92 existence, it is
striking to note how far this small group, with limited means, has
been able to achieve in the way of stable relations and of political
discussion, without sectarianism and without op****tunism, both with
currents of Black militants as well as currents around OCAW leader
Tony Mazzocchi who are fighting for the Labor Party. It is striking to
note that the place which this group occupies is not that of one of
the 200 political groups of the ultra-left in America, but that it
already and from now on occupies a different place. That their journal
sells a thousand copies, that there have been gathered 200
subscribers, that it is replete with interviews with Black leaders,
with trade union leaders, that even in a limited way we are linked to
the Labor Party Advocates current (linked with Black militants), that
we are in a position to exert an influence, modestly still, in the
direction of independent workers=92 candidatures and independent Black
candidatures for the coming elections=97this is the expression of the
fact and confirmation that it is by starting from the orientation of
the International, from the struggle aimed at the reproclamation of
the Fourth International in the struggle for the workers=92
international, starting from this framework, that we are in a position
to begin again the struggle to construct a Trotskyist party in the
United States in its true framework, which is that of the struggle,
which is not simply propagandist but practical, for the workers=92 party
and the Black party.
In the same way, the outline of a first joint initiative of Mexicans,
Canadians and Americans against the North American Free Trade Treaty
shows how the concrete, practical questions of the class struggle are
bound up in an international framework, starting from a shared
position of principle, a framework for work and campaigning which was
worked out at Barcelona.
Notes
1The term =93Cannonism=94 is not a scientific designation. It is generally
used to mean the methods and the political axis which flowed from the
thought and the activity of James P. Cannon, a leader of the American
Communist Party who joined Trotsky and the International Left
Opposition in 1927. He was the founder and builder of the American
organisation, the Socialist Workers Party. He died in 1974.
2Pablo, whose real name was Michel Raptis, was the leader of the
International Secretariat of the Fourth International. It was his pro-
Stalinist policy which was to lead to the dislocating crisis of the
Fourth International in 1953.
3Cochran was the spokesperson of the liquidationist positions of Pablo
within the SWP.
4The Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction was an international fraction
impelled by the SWP, which, while developing a whole series of correct
positions, ran into its own limitations in its refusal to put into
question the framework of the Unified Secretariat, with the result
that positions of defence of Trotskyism could exist there side by side
with positions of liquidation of Trotskyism.
5Socialist Action is an American organisation linked with the Unified
Secretariat; after having gone through a development =93to the left=94
like the SWP, it drew back and revised its own positions in order to
remain within the Unified Secretariat (see V=E9rit=E9 No. 3).
END QUOTED MATTER
------------------------------------------------------------
On Jul 22, 4:36=A0pm, John Holmes <jhol...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, nada wrote:
> > On Jul 22, 1:22 pm, stephen <srdiam...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >> On Jul 22, 9:49 am, John Holmes <jhol...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> >>> There was no great objection from the SWP rank and file, as it meant
=
few real
> >>> political changes.
>
> >> Not so, as there was a hemorrhaging of member****p. The "rank and
file"
> >> were powerless, because the democratic rights of tendencies were
> >> completely suppressed.
>
> >> srd
>
> > You seem to be be very ignorant of all the things going on at the time
> > of the RT faction expulsion. 1965 was the key year and tons of stuff
> > was happening with more than just the RT. There actually was a lot of
> > opposition to this, among other things.
>
> This is true, early-mid '60s transformation included not just the RT
> expulsion, there was Wohlforth's "reorganized* RT, the Fraser group in
> Seattle, and some other grouplets being kicked out as well I think.
> There was a general cleanout of anybody who didn't sup****t the
> Dobbs-Hansen leader****p, which Cannon himself was not thrilled about,
> that's why he wrote "Don't Strangle the Party" in 1966.
>
> I think the SL's opinion was that the SWP had become centrist with the
> adoption of the line on Cuba, and became essentially left-reformist by
> 1965 or 1966, in terms of its line in the anti-war movement. So even
> in their opinion, 1965 not 1963 should be labelled as the critical
> year.
>
>
>
> > The RT leaving is hardly a red-letter day for the SWP. It had little
> > or no effect on the SWP. The OCI had zero sup****ters or influence
> > around the SWP, leaving it up to the SLL (a huge mistake, clearly) to
> > handle the English speaking world. Why would the Lambs have anything
> > to say except their already known opposition to the reunification?
>
> > David
>
> Which they downpedal in that do***ent of course. Leaving them with
> even less to say.
>
> -jh-
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