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Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this article.
The name Leon Trotsky, his Marxist-driven strategic doctrine of permanent revolution, the leading role that he played in the pre-1917 Russian revolutionary movement as a free-lancer, the role that he played in the October revolution as a hard converted Bolshevik, his later military leadership of the defense of that revolution against the Whites and all manner of counter-revolutionaries and his epic battles for the soul of that revolution against the ascendant international Stalinist bureaucracy have occasioned so many lies wrapped in so many distortions wrapped in so many obfuscations, although not wrapped in any enigmas, that I for one when I was just a young (well, maybe not so young at that) revolutionary starting out I just had to learn more.
In those days it was hard because you had to wade through the Moscow-centered orthodox Stalinist slanders, the orthodox Maoist-centered Chinese Stalinist misunderstandings, hell, the Albanian Stalinist-centered goofiness thrown against his revolutionary virtue. That task muddled through, it was still necessary, as this article's subject indicates, to see who was marching in step, or at least half-step, with Trotsky and his Fourth Internationalist movement and who was preening. This last task, as wading once against through this article brought back to mind, was tough learning for a young man steeped in "anti-sectarian", "anti-cultish" social democracy. But I did learn more, and the more I learned the easier it was to see who was wagging the dog’s tail (like that expression?) and who was acting as an agent of the Mikado, the Argentine German Nazi underground, MI6, the CIA, some phantom Trotskyist lonelyhearts club, or your dear Aunt Sally. In any case it was not, I repeat, not Leon Trotsky. But as I constantly reiterate, old comrade Trotsky have never been, is not now, and will not be in need in the future of my certificate of revolutionary good conduct, that of any state agency, or yours. Still you have to investigate, as simply an intelligent proposition, his legacy for yourselves. And this is a decent primer.
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
********
Markin comment on this article.
The name Leon Trotsky, his Marxist-driven strategic doctrine of permanent revolution, the leading role that he played in the pre-1917 Russian revolutionary movement as a free-lancer, the role that he played in the October revolution as a hard converted Bolshevik, his later military leadership of the defense of that revolution against the Whites and all manner of counter-revolutionaries and his epic battles for the soul of that revolution against the ascendant international Stalinist bureaucracy have occasioned so many lies wrapped in so many distortions wrapped in so many obfuscations, although not wrapped in any enigmas, that I for one when I was just a young (well, maybe not so young at that) revolutionary starting out I just had to learn more.
In those days it was hard because you had to wade through the Moscow-centered orthodox Stalinist slanders, the orthodox Maoist-centered Chinese Stalinist misunderstandings, hell, the Albanian Stalinist-centered goofiness thrown against his revolutionary virtue. That task muddled through, it was still necessary, as this article's subject indicates, to see who was marching in step, or at least half-step, with Trotsky and his Fourth Internationalist movement and who was preening. This last task, as wading once against through this article brought back to mind, was tough learning for a young man steeped in "anti-sectarian", "anti-cultish" social democracy. But I did learn more, and the more I learned the easier it was to see who was wagging the dog’s tail (like that expression?) and who was acting as an agent of the Mikado, the Argentine German Nazi underground, MI6, the CIA, some phantom Trotskyist lonelyhearts club, or your dear Aunt Sally. In any case it was not, I repeat, not Leon Trotsky. But as I constantly reiterate, old comrade Trotsky have never been, is not now, and will not be in need in the future of my certificate of revolutionary good conduct, that of any state agency, or yours. Still you have to investigate, as simply an intelligent proposition, his legacy for yourselves. And this is a decent primer.
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