Workers World, Vol. 1 No. 1
Our Statement:
(By the former National Committee members of the Socialist Workers Party – Sam Marcy, Vincent Copeland, Jack Wilson, Ronald Jones and Dorothy Flint, representing New York, Buffalo, the Youngstown Steel area, the South and supporters in the West.)
Before we begin our direct appeal to the working class, it is incumbent upon us to give an account of our own revolutionary past.
We are the proletarian left wing of the Socialist Workers Party. We have now split with that party, which has gone farther and farther to the right in recent years, so that we can openly fight for orthodox Trotskyism, which is the authentic Marxism-Leninism of today.
After years of patient and loyal effort to keep the SWP on a course of principled revolutionary politics, having exhausted all avenues of struggle within its confines, we are forced to break into the arena of open conflict for the leadership of the revolutionary working class movement.
Year after year, and world shaking issue after issue, the majority of the SWP leadership have yielded under the pressure of the ever-sharpening global class struggle which has pervaded every domestic event from inner-union conflicts to the execution of the Rosenbergs. They have retreated from principled communist strategy and tactics in the fight for American socialism and the world socialist revolution. And their retreat has been too consistent, and over too long a time, to still hope that they will be capable of leading any advance in the future.
Therefore the time has now come when we, the Leninist left wing, must break with the opportunist right wing. We Leninist-Trotskyists analyzed the rightist direction the SWP majority was travelling during the long years of the Cold War. We now take that analysis to its logical conclusion. Once more and again, we hold aloft the shining banner of revolutionary Marxism, and call upon all the advanced workers to gather around it.
What is our answer to the Soviet question?
Each section of the radical movement, absolutely without exception, be it opportunist, ultra-left, centrist, or Anarchist – as well as Bolshevik – takes a position of some kind on the USSR. And it cannot be otherwise, since the Soviet Union is the consequence of the first successful workers’ revolution in history, and that revolution poses the question of power to all workers everywhere. Furthermore, the sharp collision of interest between the Soviet Union and our own imperialist ruling class poses the question of every radical party’s attitude to the American capitalist drive against the Soviet Union.
The class struggle in the United States cannot be brought to a victorious conclusion by leaders with a wrong or hazy idea about the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution. Those who are most serious about taking state power in the United States must be the most serious in their interest in the Russian question. Trotsky called for –
Unconditional defense of the Soviet Union
The SWP majority dumped this slogan during practically the entire Cold War. The Militant spoke about “our Red Army” when the U.S. capitalist class was sending lend-lease to the Soviet Union and Earl Browder could get in the back door of the White House. But the Militant could find no way of giving political support to the beleaguered Soviet State when U.S. imperialism wielded the A bomb and the H bomb against it. Trotsky always promised that in the hour of danger, the Bolshevik-Leninists (Trotskyists) would be the best friends and supporters of the Soviet Union against their “own” capitalist class. But when that hour struck, the SWP caved in under the pressure of anti-Soviet hysteria.
Our tendency maintained an uncompromising stand, and pressed within the SWP for a clear position in favor of the defense of the Soviet Union and the other workers’ states. Maintaining the line of Leon Trotsky that we must be “the best soldiers in the Red Army,” we hold that that is the first duty of the international working class, to defend without condition, all the gains of the Russian Revolution from all its enemies without and within.
Revolutionary anti-Stalinism and bourgeois anti-Stalinism
The SWP right wing has long ago dropped all slogans that might identify it as a real partisan of the workers’ states, but it has devoted much time to attacking Stalinism.
In an age when being opposed to Stalinism means different things to different people – and is the fashion on the left as well as in the camp of the class enemy – it is more than ever our duty to make clear beyond all possibility of misunderstanding just what the revolutionary opposition to Stalinism really is and should be.
We are unalterable opposed to the privileged and parasitic caste, the Soviet bureaucracy, which has fastened itself to the workers’ state, and which has imposed a class collaborationist line on the world communist movement, making the potentially invincible western European CPs into impotent parliamentary hostages of the capitalist class.
We oppose the conservatism of the Moscow leadership
The Soviet bureaucracy and its program serve to disarm the vanguard elements of the world working class ideologically, and stand in the way of the final overthrow of capitalism. The bureaucracy is nationalistic in its conservatism, and helps, or refrains from helping, the colonial and proletarian struggles, on the basis of purely Russian considerations (which to some extent are identical with its own narrow caste interests) rather than the needs of the world movement.
For example, the Communist Party of India has been told by Moscow to alter its line of opposition against the capitalist Nehru in the interest of Soviet foreign policy. (What a disgrace that the whole radical movement of the world has said hardly a word against the hypocritical Nehru who imprisons Communists and would probably close his eyes if someone hanged them as well!) The “communist” government of the Indian state of Kerala is instructed not to nationalize the industries or expropriate the capitalists, leading to the disgraceful event last summer, when the Kerala cops beat up and shot striking workers. (Hardly anybody bothers to criticize the Stalinists for this, of course, because this kind of shooting is so pleasing to bourgeois public opinion.)
But it is from this point of view that genuine communists should criticize the bureaucracy. Any revolutionary criticism of the bureaucracy must be from the point of view of irreconcilable hostility to the capitalist class.
The Gates-ite renegades
It is not necessary to explain that the whole bourgeois world criticizes the bureaucracy from quite another point of view. But apparently it is necessary to explain that John Gates, Joseph Clark and Howard Fast also criticize the bureaucracy from a bourgeois point of view. The SWP majority has hailed these famous deserters from the class struggle as allies in the fight against Stalinism!
This turns the fight against Stalinism into a vulgar, pro-bourgeois operation which helps Wall Street, and only refurbishes the false reputation of the Kremlin.
Gates, Clark and Fast and similar political figures have gone over to the camp of capitalism under a smokescreen of anti-Stalinism. By they have been whitewashed as potential revolutionary socialists by the Militant. This can no longer be called a “mistake” or a “misunderstanding.” Every child knows that John Gates is anti-communist as well as anti-Stalinist. But the right wing SWP no longer even considers itself communist, so everything is in order here.
Proletarian political revolution and bourgeois counter-revolution
We insisted against the SWP majority many years ago that the “People’s Democracies” of Eastern Europe were in reality deformed workers’ states. (The majority finally and reluctantly agreed to this in 1950.)
We supported the struggle of the workers in these states to take political power into their own hands and abolish the privileged bureaucracy in favor of genuine communism, where leadership is based on devotion and ability rather than special material rewards.
When the workers of East Germany demonstrated against higher work norms and against the bureaucrats, when the workers of Poznan marched against the bureaucracy, and when the first Hungarian workers demanded proletarian democracy, we supported them in this effort. But we warned that the absence of a genuine proletarian vanguard party at the head of the working class would lead such movements to fall prey to the ever ready leadership of bourgeois counter revolutionary forces, and the numerous friends of U.S. capitalism. (And this is exactly what happened in Hungary.) We warned that no overthrow of the bureaucracy can possibly be progressive unless there is a genuine communist party to take its place.
But the SWP raises the slogan of “political revolution” without any qualification or any clear call for communist leadership. This comes down to advocating any kind of revolution at all against the Stalinist apparatus of the workers’ state – from the left or right. This is at best a matter of irresponsibility, and at worst, a left cover for the aims of the U.S. State Department.
Bourgeoisie led Hungarian masses in a tragic counter-revolution
The SWP right wing went into raptures over the Hungarian counter-revolution. They hailed it as an example of “political revolution.” We disagreed. Our tendency stood up under the pressure of the worldwide capitalist hysteria and we supported the final intervention of the Red Army which saved Hungary from the capitalist counter-revolution and salvaged the new property relations from the capitalist restorationists. (The American “communist” party did not dare to take this position at that time any more than the SWP did. The pressure of bourgeois hysteria was too much for them.)
The Hungarian workers rose in justified insurrection against the bureaucracy, but they lacked a revolutionary party to steer them in the direction of regenerating the Hungarian workers’ state, rather than restoring capitalism, which their Social Democratic and bourgeois “Smallholder” leaders were hell-bent on doing. A restoration of bourgeois political democracy had already taken place. The restoration of bourgeois property relations was to come later.
Everybody, including the SWP, said that the Hungarians were establishing “democratic socialism.” But the supposedly revolutionary SWP leaders never answered the question: how is it that the Norman Thomases, the Max Shactmans and all the assorted right wing socialists in the world are in agreement that this “democratic socialism” is such a good thing? – or the even more interesting question, how is it that nearly all the capitalist statesmen also agree that this “democratic socialism” is such a good thing? (Incidentally, didn’t all the right wing socialists oppose the 1919 revolt in Hungary that Lenin and Trotsky supported?)
We are uncompromising in our advocacy of workers’ democracy (if that term is taken to mean the regenerated dictatorship of the proletariat). But we are utterly opposed to democracy for Kovacs, Tildy, Mindszenty and their reactionary friends, under conditions of danger to the workers’ power, and we must tell this frankly to the workers of the world.
The SWP conciliates with Tito; Tito conciliates with imperialism
The SWP right wing hailed Yugoslavia as a workers’ state only after the Stalin-controlled Cominform had driven Tito into the arms of imperialism. We recognized the existence of the Yugoslav workers’ state from the outset, called for its defense, and exposed the reactionary character of the Tito leadership as well as the reactionary nationalist motivation of Stalin in forcing the 1948 break.
The SWP has yet to take a clear stand on Tito’s bloc with Wall Street against the USSR and particularly Red China (which Tito calls “neutralism.”) Only a few months ago the SWP leaders came out for “critical support” of Tito in their theoretical magazine. But they have never demarcated their “critical support” from the critical support given to Tito by Dulles.
Petty bourgeois tears for Boris Pasternak
The bourgeois anti-Stalinism of the Militant is best expressed today in its support of the viciously anti-Soviet book, “Dr. Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak. They flatly identified Pasternak with the struggle for “workers’ democracy,” thus hopelessly compromising the whole idea of proletarian regeneration with the idea of bourgeois restorationism. (Militant of Nov. 10, 1958.)
The anti-Stalinism of the Militant has become indistinguishable from the liberal bourgeois critics of the Soviet Union, and in fact even these are often to the left of the Militant, as in the case of “Dr. Zhivago.”
As for the tenth rate question of whether it was right to suppress the book, we too are for publishing it in the Soviet Union, but we are for calling it by its right name – a White Guard political thesis in literary form.
Negro struggle and class struggle
Just as every radical tendency can be judged by its position on the Soviet Union and China, so can it be judged by its position and conduct in the Negro struggle. The SWP right wing pays a great deal of literary attention to the Negro movement, but it has surrendered any claim to a vanguard role in the actual struggle of the oppressed and exploited Negro workers. Without confidence in the working class, it has yielded leadership to the Negro middle class intellectuals and preachers. In New York, it discourages its own members from getting into the kind of jobs that would put them into daily contact with the Negro (and Puerto Rican) people.
Without confidence in the working class, the right wing opposed the slogan for a workers’ (interracial) defense guard at the height of the white supremacy terror in the South, and launched the safe demand for the sending of federal troops of the Wall Street government to the South instead.
It was our tendency that took the initiative in the fight for Willy McGee (within the SWP) and the fight to save Jimmy Wilson, as well as the earlier Rosenberg case. It is our tendency that has taken the initiative to build a revolutionary group in the South. And we are the first tendency to have done it, since the CP’s earlier days. The SWP right wing dragged its feet when it came to building the party in the South, or even trying to.
The Negro movement of the South, with all its drawbacks, and even with the habiliments of the church still clinging to it, is most probably the torch which will light the whole powder barrel of the American working class. Only a party with strong cadres in the South can hope to lead the coming socialist revolution.
Regroupment
Every serious Leninist is and must be for a regrouping of all the cadres who want socialism, who want the successful outcome of the class struggle in a government of the working class. And we are for this will all our hearts. But the SWP right wing had a different idea of regroupment. They had an idea that was in opposition to building the revolutionary vanguard party of the proletariat.
We fought in the SWP against a regroupment which aims at the emergency of an organization made up of a hodge-podge of groups on the lowest political common denominator – a non-class struggle socialism. The SWP is steering toward a catch-all, broad and inclusive organization which would agree only on the word “socialism” and the phrase “independent class politics” – in election campaigns. This is a liquidation of the class struggle concept of the road to socialism and the acceptance of a pacifist, humanist, and class collaborationist program.
We counterpose to this the regroupment of all those who stand for the unconditional defense of the Soviet Union and the other workers’ states, the class struggle road to proletarian power in the United States, and the creation of a Leninist vanguard party.
The SWP tried out its new regroupment line with the American Forum and with the Young Socialist Alliance, but neither of these organizations proved strong enough to become a vehicle for all the half-baked radicals, reformists, pacifists and humanists with whom the SWP wanted to ride. So the “Independent Socialist Party” was formed.
The ISP mish-mash
We opposed the right wing majority’s surrender of program to the pacifist mish-mash of the ISP. We explained as follows:
We can be for support to independent socialists running against capitalist candidates. But we should never give such support without making our own position clear. This means we can support the “socialist” [Corliss] Lamont; but at the same time we must condemn his support for the capitalist politician Stassen. And we must take up and expose Lamont’s humanism (which he counterposes to Marxism) far more vigorously than if we were not supporting him. And the same goes for his remark that “the class struggle is passé.”
It is all right to give critical support to candidates who call themselves socialist, but it is then all the more necessary to explain to the workers why the program of these candidates will not really lead to socialism. The Militant carried out this task by censoring passages from the ISP leaders’ speeches which clearly revealed their anti-class struggle line. And when they did publish a full text, they had little or no editorial comment (or wrong comment, as in the case of Dan Roberts’ line on German unification which practically duplicated the idea of unity through bourgeois “free elections”).
How to switch from bourgeois anti-Stalinism to vulgar conciliationism
The SWP was conciliating politically with the bourgeois pacifism and parliamentary reformism of Lamont, McManus and Co.
Furthermore, the SWP, which labels us as “pro-Stalinist,” did not think of Lamont and McManus as pro-Stalinist at all. Lamont could be for all kinds of class-collaboration, humanism, bourgeois pacifism, but because he publicly criticized the Soviet attack on “Dr. Zhivago,” he was “coming their way.” Aside from the complete theoretical impotence revealed her, this is conciliation with the bourgeoisie.
The SWP is deathly worried about “conciliation with Stalinism,” but they did not hesitate the moment they had the chance to conciliate with the bourgeois wing of Stalinism (Gates, Fast, Clark, McManus, Lamont)!
We do not mean to insult McManus and Lamont, who are in many ways courageous figures, by bracketing them with the renegade Gates and Co. – but their theoretical line is very close to these gentlemen. For example, they agree with Gates in being for “peaceful co-existence” in principle. And if the Soviet Union were compelled to rupture that “peaceful co-existence,” they might very logically condemn the Soviet Union, and not be for its defense at all.
We proposed the Leninist tactic of “critical support” for the candidacy of CP leader Ben Davis (with whom we seriously disagree) before he was ruled off the ballot. But the SWP political committee would not even discuss this proposition, thus revealing that their “regroupment” approach was only an approach to the more respectable radicals.
The SWP leaders justified last September’s hodge-podge where Harold Davies, Lamont, Otto Nathan and A.J. Muste spoke at the Hotel New Yorker, by saying that this would provide a large “regroupment” arena. But when Ben Davis asked for the chance to speak at this meeting, he was turned down. The CP members who would have come to hear Ben Davis were apparently not part of the “regroupment” arena the SWP wanted to reach, but the admirers of the British Social Democrat, Harold Davies, were.
Now Stalinism may be theoretically as wrong as Social Democracy. But every little child knows that the Social Democracy is considered friendly to American imperialism, and the Stalinists are considered hostile.
This “revolutionary” intransigence toward the persecuted Stalinists sits very badly on people who are so conciliatory to the Social Democrats and the more acceptable and respectable semi-Stalinists.
But it was the same SWP right wing, which now submerges itself in the pacifist milieu, which stood aside, covering itself with left phrases, when the Wall Street red baiters took the knife to the Progressive Party movement. Our tendency favored critical support for the Progressive Party (in spite of the “leadership” of Wallace), without a merging of the programmatic banners.
But at that time, the hysteria against the Soviet Union and the CP in America was at a fever pitch – so the SWP said that the PP was a “third capitalist party” and that we, the proletarian left wing, were “conciliating with Stalinism.”
Only fear of the witch hunt at its peak can explain the resistance of the SWP right wing to our determined effort to have the party take the initiative and involve itself in the fight for the lives of the Rosenbergs. The Militant only acted on this case after there was a worldwide outcry, and after even the Pope in Rome had interceded for these class war prisoners.
Where the Militant now champions the fight for the release of Morton Sobell, it should be noted that the SWP right wing did not discover this case (which was part of the Rosenberg case) until long after the execution of the Rosenbergs and the sentencing of Sobell.
The SWP has raised a whole series of cadres in the atmosphere of frantic election campaigns. These campaigns have only had the effect of establishing the harmless respectability of the SWP in the eyes of the labor bureaucracy and the petty bourgeois “regroupers.” And they have miseducated the SWP cadres and diverted them from the class struggle itself.
We favor socialist election campaigns in which it is possible to raise the class consciousness of the workers. But we reject the year-after-year Norman Thomas-type election campaign as a pale parliamentary substitute for the “independent class politics” the SWP thinks it is.
It is noteworthy that while the SWP majority has been most vociferous (and well-meaning of course) about the “political revolution” in the Soviet bloc, they have been soft pedaling the idea of proletarian revolution at home in capitalist America. The teachings of Lenin and Trotsky on the seizure of power by the proletariat have more and more been shelved in favor of the parliamentary road to socialism.
It is good to remember that the parliamentary socialists of Germany in 1914 were all in favor of revolution – in France. And the socialists of France were all for revolution – in Germany.
Talk in bourgeois America about a political revolution in the Soviet Union by a tendency that puts all its energies in the ballot box, and is not interested in conducting even one small strike in New York City, deserves a harsher word than we wish to employ here.
Unlike the right wing majority, we hailed the victorious Chinese Revolution in 1949. We fought for the acceptance of that momentous working class victory with the SWP for six years before the majority would grant – on paper – that the capitalist state in China had been destroyed and that a workers’ state had emerged.
But this was an illusory victory for us. In the face of U.S. imperialism’s hostility to the Chinese revolution in all its forms, the Militant has not said one word about the new and unprecedented development of the Chinese communes. It is more than a year since the appearance of these revolutionary formations, and the whole capitalist press is attacking them. But the Militant fails to oppose this attack and explain to the workers of the United States what a phenomenal step forward this represents for the whole working class.
John Foster Dulles has expressed the hope that a revolution “of the Hungary type” will occur in China. Should such a “revolution” occur – and we are sure that it will be defeated if it does – the SWP, with its false position on Hungary uncorrected, may very well support it and forever condemn itself as even a progressive, much less a revolutionary, tendency.
As for us, by cutting ourselves off from the Militant, the SWP and their petty bourgeois mockery of Trotsky’s position, we will be able to fight openly for the defense of workers’ China as well as the Soviet Union, for clarity in the workers’ movement, and for a new revolutionary leadership.
Thus we will lay the basis for the regeneration of Bolshevism, and insure the socialist victory of the workers of the world.
Last updated: 11 May 2026