This is the history of a small grouping of workers and intellectuals that have broken with all professed Marxist groupings. On the face of it, it would seem that this is of concern to no one but those involved, much less any substantial part of the American working class. The opposite is the case.
There used to be a time when a worker, sick of the crimes and hypocrisies of capitalist society, could find a refuge and a way out in organizations based upon the theory and practice of Marxism. However various were the forms Marxism took, it always had been a doctrine of liberation and freedom and above all, of liberation and freedom for the workers of the world. In times of peace as in times of war, Marxism propounded and debated and worked out policies for the working class, governed always by the idea of its liberation from all types of tyranny. Those days are gone.
A serious worker, that is a worker who is thinking seriously about the problems of the working class, cannot shirk the issue of precisely, what is Marxism.
Our grouping has broken with all professed Marxist groupings in order to pay attention to the workers and to try to find out what Marxism really is, not what Marx wrote in 1848 or 1867, but where his theory stands today, 1953.
All these professed Marxists have never understood the American people, or rather they have never understood Marxism. They always learned it as a foreign doctrine, and then tried to graft it on to the American masses, instead of studying the history, the life and thoughts of the American people and the American nation and finding there the specific manner in which the universal truths of Marxism - the liberation of the masses from all exploitation - were expressing themselves. Thus they never studied the Abolitionist movement seriously. Yet this was a movement born in America 100 years ago - and 83 years before what is known as Leninism. It was headed by such uncompromising fighters as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass. And it was a movement which had achieved in many ways, as we will show later, a concept of human relations that the Socialists and Communists in this country had not.
We have broken from all old radical groupings because of the complete capitalist mentality of all of them - Communists, Trotskyites, Reutherites. They understand far less of the workers than the intelligent capitalist does. They all of them thirst to lead; their whole idea and aim is to sit in the seats of the capitalists, that's all. The workers are to stay where they are. That is what they call socialism. But that is precisely the type of socialism that the American working class has rejected, although its disillusionment with the men of power and authority is total.
It is true that there is no Marxist party in the United States. But if those people who profess they are Marxists think that that means the end of everything, they are displaying total blindness to the fact that the basis of Marxism is not in any party but in what the workers are doing and thinking.
The American working class is Marxist to the very marrow of its bones. Just look at it. Millions upon millions at one time or another believed in war for democracy, war to end war, League of Nations, peace, prosperity and progress. Today nobody does. In national politics it is the same. Fear of atomic war, the daily struggle against the speed-up, the corruption of politicians, murderous taxation; the worker in the plant or mine, the share-cropper, the back-aching typist, the student waiting to be called by his draft board, do any of them believe that anything has changed now that Eisenhower is President instead of Truman? Does any Negro believe that a new president and a new administration will do anything to alter the situation of Negroes in Africa; Arabs in Morocco, Tunis, and the Middle East; Spanish workers under Franco, Indian peasants, Australian workers, never in the world was there so universal a revolt among countless millions everywhere against the exploitation and the incompetence of their rulers, and the unending disasters they have imposed upon mankind for the last thirty years.
The rulers know it. The workers of the world no longer believe what they are told. The workers of Western Europe are so sick of war for democracy that they have split the American ruling class wide open. One group, led by Truman and Eisenhower, are frantically trying to whip the Europeans up for war, by corruption and intimidation, using William Green, George Meany, the Reuther brothers, Dubinsky, Lovestone, Irving Brown, and others of that type, as their agents among the European labor leaders. The second group, led by MacArthur and Hoover, think that defeatism is so widespread abroad that arms and money poured into Europe will end up as gifts to the Russian army when it moves. That is the great debate. They are debating over what the European workers will do. If they were sure of those workers, there would be no debate.
It is not only workers who do not believe. The great majority of the people do not believe. For observe. The government, the press, the politicians, the professors and the parsons, radio and television, scream with one voice that America must be saved from Communism. It is obvious that Russian Communism is a monstrous barbarism. It is equally obvious that its international power has steadily grown. Yet the hundreds of thousands of students in the universities are bitterly hostile to being drafted. If they believed what they were told, the would be willing to go.
That is what the rulers call the free world. How different is it with the one-party totalitarian states? Stalin, his stooges in Eastern Europe, and his allies in China, who between them rule nearly 890 million people, have so little faith in being believed that they can rule only by the most savage police-states history has ever known. They have a bullet waiting for anyone, however highly placed, who dares to express and opinion contrary to theirs. They have to keep their frontiers closed against all foreign visitors, all foreign newspapers, not even a postcard can go into these countries without being censored. They go to unlimited trouble and expense to jam out foreign wireless stations, anyone in those countries listening to the foreign radio faces slave labor in a concentration camp. How the so-called democrats denounce all this! They say that it is a monstrous tyranny, the most horrible the world has ever seen. But the government of the United States has itself instituted such a system of terror against those whom it calls subversives, that today vast numbers of people would not put their names to the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights because they are afraid they would be accused of disloyalty and Communism. These rulers too know what their workers think of them.
This total disillusionment of the mass with the men of power and authority is one of the greatest advances ever made in human society. Yet the professed Marxists do not respect the American working class at all. They pay no attention to what it is really doing and thinking. They believe that if they had a chance to plan everything then that would be the new society. But, as Stalinist Russia has shown, the would only be the greatest totalitarianism on earth.
We are not out to "lead". We are unalterably opposed to all planners. Marx had shown, as far back as 1867, that there were only two alternatives in contemporary society; either the self-activity of the workers or the total plan over the workers. We are forever through with those who failed to see this in theory and who hailed in practice the "planned economy". When World War II began and Trotskyism called for the defence of Russia, we broke with it. When World War II ended and the American Trotskyites at least looked as if they retained a revolutionary perspective in America, we returned to them. But the degeneration in theory had eaten into their very lives and their relations with their own rank and file. We are now finished with them completely and forever. And yet it is only through the concrete struggle with them that we could have clarified ourselves and found the new elements - rank and file workers, Negroes, women, youth - for the new grouping.
The strength of our theory is this: it sees no individual or grouping as apart from the world objective situation. It therefore sees, within its own organization, the reflection of all that is on the outside. But it is not mere reflection. Different groupings, representing different social layers, forming different political tendencies, are brought so close together that the sharpest conflicts are inevitable, and because the conflict is sharp and concentrated, so is the solution. By a close study, day and night, then of all the relationships and tendencies inside, by never parting for a moment from its own rank and file which has the closest association with the masses outside on which all depends, there is revealed in a tiny and concentrated form, not only the problems of the day which the outside world shows, but the outline of the perspective of the future which only Marxism can anticipate.
What we want to do therefore is to tell the story of the development of Marxism in the United States in strict relationship to the development of the class struggles here. This story will show that in revolutionary politics not only do the great ideas and events explain small and apparently insignificant things, but that the opposite also is true. Through close observation of small political groups we are able to see ideas and forces of vast scope more clearly and profoundly.
Last updated on 09 January 2026