*From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America)- Theses on the American Revolution (1946)

Click on the headline to link to the article described in the title.

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. A recent example of that linkage in this space was when I argued in this space that, for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, one must examine closely the fate of Marx’s First International, the generic socialist Second International, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Revolution-inspired Communist International, and Trotsky’s revolutionary successor, the Fourth International before one looks elsewhere for a centralized international working class organization that codifies the principle –“workers of the world unite.”

On the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I am speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, 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 made up the organization under review, the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Beyond that there are several directions to go in but these are the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s. If I am asked, and I have been, this is the material that I suggest young militants should start of studying to learn about our common political forbears. And that premise underlines the point of the entries that will posted under this headline in further exploration of the early days, “the dog days” of the Socialist Workers Party.

Note: I can just now almost hear some very nice and proper socialists (descendents of those socialism for dentist-types) just now, screaming in the night, yelling what about Max Shachtman (and, I presume, his henchman, Albert Glotzer, as well) and his various organizational formations starting with the Workers party when he split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940? Well, what about old Max and his “third camp” tradition? I said the Trotskyist tradition not the State Department socialist tradition. If you want to trace Marxist continuity that way, go to it. That, in any case, is not my sense of continuity, although old Max knew how to “speak” Marxism early in his career under Jim Cannon’s prodding. Moreover at the name Max Shachtman I can hear some moaning, some serious moaning about blackguards and turncoats, from the revolutionary pantheon by Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. I rest my case.

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*What's Up With The Leninist Vanguard Party Concept?- A Discussion Note

Click on the headline to link to the "Lenin Internet Archive" online copy of Lenin's famous, "What Is To Be Done?: Burning Issues Of Our Movement" that will give the entry below some perspective.

Markin comment;

Recently I have mentioned in a number of entries that I have worked in the past with, and now work with, a loose "circle" of local anti-war militants who have decided on a three point program to fight Obama’s war policies over the coming year, highlighted by the struggle to create anti-war soldiers and sailors solidarity committees.
I have also recently placed a number of pieces of historical interest around the World War I anti-imperialist, anti-war work done by Lenin and the Bolshevik Party that he led at the time. A comparison of the differences between the two types of political work as portrayed in my entries, and as was pointed out to me most graphically by a local political opponent who is a supporter of an organization that claims a Leninist organizational heritage, seems to be contradictory. Add in the factor that this blog, in many ways, does not have much meaning or reason for existence except as a vehicle to learn the lessons that Lenin and Trotsky drew about revolutionary politics, and organization, and the contradiction seems even greater.

That said, what is the great to-do about? Just this. The core of Leninist politics has historically evolved around intransigent opposition to non-revolutionary strategic considerations in the struggle for our communist future AND the notion of a vanguard working class party as the vehicle to take power on the road to that future. The organizational form that that party form has taken, for those who today may not be familiar with what in the past was a serious difference of political perspectives, was that this organization would be staffed by, in short, professional revolutionaries and held together by democratic-centralist discipline. That form of discipline, when in right working order allowed for pretty free-wheeling discussion internally between comrades but once a decision was made, right or wrong, in public the party would operate under that majority line. The other, traditional social-democratic form called for a party of the whole class, warts and all, and a basic cavalier attitude toward carrying out the party line, except when you crossed swords with the party bureaucracy. Trotsky had many early disagreements with Lenin over this dispute but, for our purposes here, once he was won over to Lenin’s organizational perspective he held to that view until his assassination by a Stalinist agent in 1940.

That is, in a nutshell, the outline of the historic argument. How does that fit in with the work of a man, this writer, who claims to stand in the Leninist tradition today yet who works in a “circle”, a devise that in Russian revolutionary history was discarded by almost all serious revolutionaries in the late 19th century as inadequate to the tasks at hand for the upcoming revolution that everyone saw as necessary, and was coming in due course? Well, a history of the “circle” is in order. The core of this group, including this writer, came together in the fall of 2001 in response to the threat of then President George W. Bush’s to blow Afghanistan to smithereens in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks.

I have mentioned, I think, in previous entries that there have been quite a few times in my long “street” political career that I have faced all sorts of dangerous situations and that I was very seldom fearful for my person. In those post-Trade Center days being out on the streets in opposition to that Afghan war I was afraid, more often than not. Not from the right wing crazies; that comes with the territory of left wing politics. Nor from the police who see these things all in day’s work whether they get to beat heads or not. Nor, as in past experiences, from some bizarre Stalinist or anarchoid left political "thugs". No this fear stemmed from the reaction of the average placid fellow citizen who was ready to take my scalp and made me realize that while I might have American citizenship I was not an American to them. What got me, and us, through those days was the internal discipline and camaraderie of the "circle". That, my friends, was a baptism of fire that you do not walk way from easily, not should you, all other things being equal.

And what of the political composition of the circle? Well, it was, and is, all over the place from semi-pacifist to ostensibly Leninist, with some quasi-anarchism thrown in for good measure, but the core that has held it together, other than that extreme sense of camaraderie mentioned above, is an anti-American imperialist ethos. A need to see the American “monster” held in check, tamped down. The current “three whales” program is a codification of that- opposition to American military adventures as they pop up; a need to break with the old politics and create a workers party that fights for a workers government; and, as the most overt expression of that need to “tamp down” the “monster”, those anti-war soldiers and sailors solidarity committees. That we agree on.

I also wrote in a recent blog that there was internal controversy over the question of putting energies into building the then called-for spring anti-war rallies in Washington, D.C. on March 20th. We are thus emphatically not a democratic- centralism organization. I would, since I have to write about it here, characterize it as an on-going rolling “united front”. Others may, given my description, call it a propaganda bloc. Not Leninist, in any case. Yet, until I see something on the horizon that is more attractive and more coherent that the myriad other "circles", leagues, groups, tendencies, committees and "parties" I am perfectly comfortable with this formation. Lenin may turn over in his mausoleum but that is the case right now