Reminiscences by Sam Marcy
“A tribute to Sam Marcy and his life-long commitment to a Workers World”
85th birthday journal
October 5, 1996
It seems to me I have been a communist since childhood.
CHILDHOOD IN RUSSIA
I was born in a small Jewish village in czarist Russia in 1911. My father had left just a few months before my birth and gone to America. My mother Frima and her three children were going to rejoin him once he had earned enough money to send for us. But then came the imperialist world war. It took 10 years before we were reunited.
In 1917, the czar was overthrown in February. Then came the workers’ revolution in October. But the rich wouldn’t give up that easily and instigated a Civil War. My earliest memories are of the Red Army and their treatment of refugees. During the Civil War, my family had to move from place to place with the changing fortunes of the Red Army. We regarded it as our army. The Red Army defended the Jewish population, while the White Guards were the enemy who carried out anti-Semitic pogroms.
My family would have been victimized had it not been for the Red Army. I remember one cold night we had to run from the Whites – the counter-revolutionaries. In those days my clothing was made from flour sacks, which were very rough. My shoes were tumble-down. One of them came off as we ran, so one foot was bare and I couldn’t run fast. My brother Philip grabbed me and carried me until a peasant family took us in. They weren’t Jewish but they were poor, too.
My clearest memory of the Red Army is of one day when Philip and I were sitting on a stoop on the main street in the village and Red Army soldiers came by. I was scared to see the soldiers, but my brother said with pride, “Those are our soldiers.” “How do you know?” I asked. He walked over to one of the soldiers and asked for a puff of his cigarette. My brother was not of smoking age and the soldier looked at him skeptically. Then he offered my brother one puff. My brother came back and said, “See, they’re ours.”
In my early childhood, I had no opportunity to go to school, not only because of the extreme poverty but because there were so few schools in the area. My older sister Sarah was sent to relatives in town to get some education. But because of the Civil War and my family’s dislocation, I didn’t learn to speak and write the Russian language. I only learned a Jewish dialect – Yiddish.
After many adventures, we finally arrived in New York. There I had to learn to read and write at the same time I was learning English.
A TEENAGER IN THE YCL
My first efforts at political organizing were in the Young Workers and Students League (YWSL) in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Members of the Communist Party paid careful attention to my activities and advised me to be a member of the Young Communist League (YCL) informally while building the YWSL. It seemed to grow rapidly under my influence, but the effort was disrupted by a competing organization, the Socialist Labor Party, which wanted to expose communist influence in the YWSL.
During the thirties, my interest in communism and the political struggles within the international movement absorbed a great deal of my time, both in and out of school and in the progressive organizations of the time. I was very concerned about the struggle of the groupings in the Communist International and the CPUSA.
But my deepest concern at that time was in the developments within the German working class. I watched with bated breath every new development in the struggle against fascism. It received a lot of publicity in the U.S. press. The New York Post advertised forthcoming articles with the headline: “Communism or fascism in Germany – Which will it be?”
Most of the young people around the YCL were deeply concerned with the outcome. The question of the tactics and strategy of the United Front were constantly discussed, above all the tactic of building a united front only from below and not with the leaders of the Social Democratic Party, which the CP regarded as “social fascist” – socialist in words, fascist in deeds. This was a ruinous strategy, as was proved when Hitler took over without a shot being fired by the German CP in defense of the workers’ movement.
Those with their eyes open could see that there was a real possibility of a Hitlerite victory unless the CP abandoned its strategy of a “united front from below” and made a serious offer for a united front to the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party, not just to the rank and file. The CP leaders refused to do this until the last minute, when it was already too late. No armed struggle was prepared.
Hitler’s victory brought an entirely new epoch in which the CP abandoned the old strategy of the “united front from below” but replaced it with an all-embracing Popular Front with the Social Democrats and bourgeois liberals, in which the class struggle was completely discarded and ignored.
Those are some of the positions which I believe contributed to the decay of the revolutionary communist movement.
LEARNING TO ORGANIZE WORKERS
My first job – and my first attempt at organizing – was at Spotless Laundry. The washing had to start very early in the morning, around 6:30. It was cold and the smell was awful, but they didn’t ask for working papers.
There was no union. My efforts to build one were fruitless because of inexperience and because I prematurely pushed the propaganda of the Communist Party and the Young Communist League, especially the Daily Workers. I was discharged after several months. But I was happy in one way because then I could return to playing third base with the neighborhood punchball team, the Hawks.
I later worked for New York Merchandise Co., the biggest wholesale and drygoods company in New York City. I tried to organize it into what became Local #65 of the United Wholesale and Retail Employees, after successfully recruiting into the Young Communist League almost a dozen young friends.
I was again discharged, but this time I was able to put up a fight for reinstatement. Under new legislation adopted in the Roosevelt era, the company was forced to reinstate me and several others. It was considered a big victory at the time. But the Supreme Court nullified the legislation, and I was discharged again. Several years later Congress passed new legislation and the company was again forced to offer reinstatement. But by this time I was Director of Organization of Local 292 of the Paper Workers Union.
In between, I graduated from James Madison High School, Brooklyn College and finally the College of Law at St. John’s University. I was admitted to the bar in New York City in 1940.
As director of organization for the Paper Workers and as the union’s attorney, I actually was one of the two top leaders of the union. During the wartime period, the unions had abandoned the right to strike in the interests of the war effort. But quite a number of the smaller unions, including my own, refused to do so.
I soon accumulated invaluable experience in dealing with the War Labor Board and was in contact with some of the larger unions, which I assisted in their relations with the Board.
It was in that role that I got a close-up look at the friendly, almost intimate relations between management and the top labor leaders and learned how their public stance, sometimes militant, contrasted sharply with the private lunches and dinner meetings with the bosses.
I learned of innumerable telephone conversations where the real negotiations took place. The public meetings of labor and management contrasted sharply with the private ones.
From this I deduced the necessity for every union to have strong rank and file committees, in addition to the official elected ones, to both attend and participate in negotiations along with the officials.
The experience during the War Labor Board period afforded me a great opportunity to observe the labor movement from within. My reputation as a militant soon made my tenure in the union incompatible with the current pro-war hysteria and the attack on militants in the unions.
Our fraction, which included Comrades Dorothy Ballan, Calvin DeCrescenzo, Florence Wand and Jane Kelly, carried on an unremitting struggle. Our expulsion soon followed as a result of the instigation of the international union, which was completely lined up with the labor bureaucracy.
My experience at the top during the war years gave me an invaluable opportunity to see with my own eyes how some of the great unions actually conducted themselves in their relation to the bosses – how class collaboration is practiced in private even when militancy and opposition seem to characterize public relations.
WORKERS WORLD PARTY
In 1959, I founded Workers World Party along with Vincent Copeland, Dorothy Ballan, Ted Dostal and others. We were the organizers of the Socialist Workers Party in Buffalo, N.Y., and Youngstown, Ohio – two industrial centers – and for years had constituted the left wing of the party.
We had a revolutionary view of the USSR, China and Eastern Europe which differed from that of the party leadership beginning with the Cold War, making us in effect a party within a party. However, we stayed in during the fifties as disciplined and loyal members because there was no other way to maintain our political activity in that period and because relations with the CPUSA were impossible.
We based our conceptions on those developed by Marx, Engels and Lenin. Trotsky contributed much to explaining the era that followed Lenin’s death. However, I do not adhere to any of the so-called Trotskyist tendencies which, in my opinion, had become violently anti-Soviet and anti-socialists, as shown by their hostility to the USSR as it existed, to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, and above all to the People’s Republic of China.
Our group was among the first in the U.S. to recognize the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and to promote its defense. Some of the others, like the SWP, have since moderated their attacks on some of the socialist countries, but they are basically hostile to communism.
Workers World Party was born in the struggle against imperialism, responding to its violent attacks on the oppressed countries and on the workers and oppressed nationalities in the metropolitan countries.
Our basic difference with the CPUSA has been that it is basically a reformist party which since 1928 has seen fit to support the bourgeois candidates of the Democratic Party, almost without fail. Some years ago, Gus Hall, General Secretary of the CPUSA, admitted in a speech printed in the party’s paper that the CP had made a 30-year mistake in supporting the Democratic Party as the lesser evil. Abandoning this old conception seemed to be a giant step forward in putting the party back on a class struggle basis.
But later, without any public discussion, the CP resumed its old reactionary position by supporting the principal candidates of the bourgeoisie – Carter and Mondale. It has done so with Clinton and Gore as well.
WHERE WE STAND TODAY
When we started Workers World Party, it was just a small group. Now we are strong. We are the only political party that can change gears and retain our revolutionary position at the same time. We’re not afraid that lethargy or lack of support from the rank and file will be an obstacle if conditions require a change of course – as has happened with the collapse of the USSR. We know we can win them over if things are explained very carefully over a period of time.
As Marxists, we must recognize that the general worldwide trend, following the collapse of the USSR, has been very much against us. It has put the workers as a whole, and communists in particular, on the defensive.
At the same time, Marxists must recognize that despite the deeply reactionary character of this epoch, it is only temporary. Objectively, this is the era of capitalist decline. We must use this period of adjustment to be better prepared for the coming revolutionary epoch and the establishment of socialism.
Last updated: 11 May 2026