This compilation of documents by Sam Marcy may at first sight be a little formidable to new comrades. But it is actually the shortest and simplest summary of the theoretical and ideological positions that led to the formation of Workers World Party and still constitute a large part of our doctrine.
It is even possible to say that the first document in particular was, when it was written in 1950 and still is today, a summary of the world relation of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, as well as a long-term orientation for proletarian revolutionaries.
There are few documents in the communist movement that can be so defined or stand such a test. Where is the analysis of either world or national political conditions written by Browder, Foster, or Stalin that can even stand the light of day today, much less be considered at all applicable to our own time?
Even in the greatly changed world situation of 1973 there is nothing of substance that has to be altered in these essays, nothing that we would wish to erase from the history of our ideological battles. On the contrary, it may be that only through some perusal of these records can one fully appreciate our method and fully understand our application of Marxism-Leninism.
However, some of the emphasis would have to be changed in similar discussions today. And since the events and personalities and even the parties discussed are different, and since altogether new political parties are now on the scene, it is necessary to introduce these pieces with some description of the political situation that prevailed when they were written.
And it is necessary to add that this is why we make this an internal document. It is not that any of our history is a secret from the movement or from our class. But it is impossible to correctly interpret certain important nuances of these particular documents—which are from sixteen to twenty-three years old and were “internal” to begin with—without being fairly well tuned-in to the politics and theory of Workers World Party.
To begin with, they were all directed against the leadership of the old Socialist Workers Party at a time when that leadership still remembered, however dimly, the great Russian Revolution. And although it was already betraying the revolutionary teachings of Leon Trotsky, it still kept the shell of those teachings and it still appeared to be to the left of the U.S. Communist Party. Its anti-Sovietism and anti-communism were not so pronounced as today, and were concealed from its own membership and even to some degree from ourselves. The membership generally still imagined the party was for the revolutionary defense of the Soviet Union.
In this connection one of the most important nuances of the 1950 document on the Global Class War is expressed in the use of the term “Stalinist.” This term is used exclusively in the old sense in that document—that is, as a characterization of the conservative, revisionist and occasionally even reactionary wing of the world communist movement.
Stalin was still alive in 1950 and was actively trying to maneuver for “peaceful coexistence” even in the middle of the cold war. He had only gained the image of a left-winger because of the three preceding years of world bourgeois hostility, and then only in some quarters. (It is extremely dubious, for example, whether Mao Tse-tung at that time regarded Stalin as a very strong champion of the Chinese revolution!)
In the fight between Trotsky and Stalin it was Trotsky who constantly referred to his own faction as the “Bolshevik-Leninist” faction, and it was Stalin who referred to the Left Opposition members as “Trotskyists.” Trotsky never really accepted the latter term and he himself always put sarcastic quotation marks around it. Finally, in self-defense, he called the conservative faction “Stalinist”—but mainly in order to emphasize that Stalin personified a basic departure from Leninism.
Given the continued isolation of the revolutionary wing, it was inevitable that we should lose the terminological battle and that the term “Stalinism” would come to mean—in a way—what the CP said it meant or what the bourgeoisie said it meant, since language by its very nature is the instrument of large numbers of people.
Comrade Marcy turned to just this subject in the final document, that of 1957, and gives a political and class analysis of the question. By this time it was crucially important, particularly in the light of Khrushchev's speech against Stalin (which nearly all factions including the Chinese CP, supported at the time) to make a clear exposition of the term and show its relatively progressive side. Significantly enough, nobody but Marcy made this clarification, so far as I am aware.
But the first document, that of 1950, needs to be viewed with the thorough understanding of the words “Stalinism” and “Stalinist” in their original context as meaning in the document the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution— and nothing else.
The document was written just after the Korean War began, and when it seemed to be already over, after MacArthur had pushed up through North Korea to the Yalu River border of Peoples China. This was before the Chinese came into the war and when Korea appeared to be defeated by the imperialists.
Thus much is said in the past tense about a Korean “defeat.” And this was happily corrected by later events not recorded in the document. However the thesis is saturated with optimism about the “coming” victories over imperialism and the Chinese assistance to Korea was in that sense fully predicted.
The SWP had at first taken a “hands off” attitude in the Korean War, supporting neither North nor South and actually talking about “puppets of the West and puppets of the East” or some such formulation. But after a few weeks, partly under pressure from the Marcy tendency, and partly because of the aweinspiring struggle of the Koreans themselves, the party came out for the proletarian North. But even then, the SWP leadership did not remotely take the position of “two class camps,” much less that of two global class camps, as advocated in the document.
In fact, this document on global class war led directly to the SWP accusation of “Stalinism” against the Marcy tendency.
Marcy was in reality continuing Trotsky's defense of the Soviet Union in the new post-World War Two epoch and moreover asserting the revolutionary defense as opposed to the conservative, intermittent, undependable, maneuverist, Stalinist defense. But the SWP leaders called this ... Stalinism!
The irony of it all was that they themselves were supposed to be infinitely more for the defense of the revolution than the CP, but they had managed to become in reality less for that defense than the CP. If this is not said explicitly in the document, it is only because of the deception and self-deception practiced by the SWP leadership at the time. Marcy could suspect or deduce such an attitude on the SWP leadership's part, but it would have been impossible to make such a suspicion public, or to define it politically and clearly at the time.
In retrospect, however, it must be said categorically that the SWP leadership, in spite of their traditions, were already by 1950, hiding behind Trotsky's proletarian revolutionary anti-Stalinism and using it to rationalize a gradually more conservative position, as they had during the previous two or three years of the cold war.
The first formal tipoff as to their changing position was their difficulty at arriving at a theoretical definition of the class nature of the countries of Eastern Europe and above all in defining the class nature of the new Chinese state.
Among the several important contributions of Marcy’s 1950 document was Marcy's insistence that Peoples China was in fact the dictatorship of the proletariat. Such a position was absolutely unique in the SWP at that time and was one of the reasons that the SWP leaders labeled us as “Stalinists.”
It should be added at once, of course, that this was also a bold proposition in the world movement as a whole. No one else, so far as I know, in Europe or Asia or in the United States, made this point—and certainly not with such categorical clarity.
The U.S. CP called Peoples China a “People's Democracy.” (It did draw most of the conclusions that would flow from our own more scientific and revolutionary description. And its weaker characterization was partly in imitation of Stalin, partly a special American version of bowing to the cold war in terminology.) And in China itself the party also hedged, although perhaps more for political reasons and pressures (e.g., from the left Kuomintang) than because of theoretical errors.
The second document—that of 1953—concretizes some of the propositions of the first in connection with actual organizational questions. It is complicated, however, by the fact that it refers to a “Majority” and a “Minority” and the Minority was not the Marcy tendency, but another one that had found some vulnerable points in the Majority (Cannon-Dobbs) position, but were themselves on the way out of the movement altogether.
Comrade Marcy's analysis here is also remarkable for its anticipation of this fact and for its careful sorting out of the Majority and Minority attitudes toward the CP. He shows the Minority’s accusation against the Majority for “sectarianism” in refusing to deal with the CP was a false issue. The question was one of opportunism and capitulation to imperialism through the medium of SWP adapting to the imperialist-influenced trade union workers at that time. But it was opportunism on both sides.
The SWP majority was capitulating to imperialism, as the Minority somewhat understood. And the Minority was capitulating to the old “Stalinism”—or rather to the idea that an ideological coalition between revolutionary Trotskyism and the CP would result in great gains. In one sense this might have been very true. But the view lacked seriousness as well as principle and the Minority did not even try to carry out its supposed perspective when it left the SWP.
Marcy shows what the problem really was. His comments on Henry Wallace, on the Rosenbergs and on the Trotsky conversations on critical support of Browder's Presidential campaign, are all meant to emphasize the problem of a correct and revolutionary approach to the CPs of the world. And in the course of this he shows that the U.S. workers do not have a separate destiny (as Cannon and the SWP Majority wanted to believe) Independent of the world communist movement, and that a workers’ cadre must be created that is international to the core, in spite of American pragmatism and chauvinist anti-foreignism.
There emerges concretely in the third document what is still a little abstract in the second, or at least not as sharp as in the third. This is the attitude toward the crisis within the CP. Which way are the CP dissidents going? To the left or to the right?
Naturally, there have always been some left dissidents (among them, originally, ourselves). But ever since the cold war, the SWP leaders showed a remarkable ability to welcome the right dissidents, who were the predominant trend since that time, and an inability to see who were the leftists!
This letter about the evolution of Joseph Clark, a long-time leader of the CP, was just one of a whole series of statements we made after the 20th Congress of the CP of the Soviet Union, the one in which Khrushchev made his famous 1956 speech against Stalin. It was a year after the Hungarian counter-revolution, which figures importantly in the logic of the letter.
This particular letter was written in 1957 just about a year and a half after Khrushchev's speech. And even at that time no one but ourselves had analyzed that speech from the left. Even the Chinese revolutionaries were only to criticize it several years later.
After Khrushchev's speech and after the Hungarian counter-revolution in particular, there was a veritable exodus out of the CPs of the world, especially the U.S. CP. And this was the occasion for the biggest illusions on the part of the SWP leadership that they were going to recruit thousands of ex-CP’ers. (In this they took over the vacated position of the “Minority” discussed in the second document.)
It is also worth noting that the SWP leaders were not alone in their giddiness about the “new” CP stance and what they called “regroupment of the left.” The general U.S. movement was at its nadir, even though McCarthyism as such had been set back by the liberal bourgeoisie. And many were the elements, including some leaders in the CP today, who thought Khrushchev was leading them toward a great new radicalization and reconciliation of tendencies on a world basis. And from the heights of Mao Tse-tung to the depths of Carl Davidson (or his equivalents at the time) nobody but ourselves challenged this thesis.
Comrade Marcy's letter was then all the more illuminating about the real situation. But by the same token it threw a bucket of cold water on the hot hopes of the “regroupers” in the SWP. So it led to cries of “sectarianism” against us as well as the old familiar accusation of “Stalinism.”
Finally, from all this and especially from the documents themselves it ought to be clear why ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we do not rush to defend ourselves nowadays when our critics call us “Stalinist.”
This is not because of the nature of Stalinism, but because of the nature of our critics. Nearly all of these solidarize in some way with the SWP or with the “democratic opposition” (i.e. the capitalist restorationists) in the Soviet Union. As against them, we solidarize with the “Stalinists” even while we oppose the ideology of Stalinism.
As for those other critics among the so-called Maoist-Stalinists of the United States today, those who call us “counter-revolutionary Trotskyists,” etc., they may prove to be less of a problem in the long run despite their present ultimatistic and thoughtless invective. But their case requires special treatment which the present documents, although obviously monumental alongside the Lilliputian efforts of the “theoreticians” of the Guardian stripe, do not supply.
This omission, it should be remembered, is mostly due to the fact that Mao himself omitted any defense of Stalin at the time. And outside of ourselves no one in the United States had yet noticed that Mao was to the left of Khrushchev (which he undoubtedly was, in spite of his silence on Khrushchev and the 20th Congress!)
This important question is now somewhat more pressing and contemporary than the matters contained in the present work. But without a clear understanding of the old questions it will be difficult for us to gain the kind of clarity that we need in dealing with new ones.