Wohlforth Archive | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Written: 1964-1969.
First Published: 1971.
Source: A Bulletin Book for Labor Publications Inc., New York 1971.
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Introduction
We have now entered into the period of the 1970s – the period of Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky wrote the Transitional Program precisely for a period such as is opening before us today. It is not just a document which assesses what is wrong with Stalinism or other trends. It is a program for the construction of mass revolutionary parties with the task of these parties the struggle for power itself.
The Transitional Program is based on an assessment of the objective situation as one characterized by the deepest crisis of capitalism. This, Trotsky saw, as the central characteristic of capitalism in its present imperialist stage. May-June 1968 and its aftermath of class struggles in the metropolitan countries including now the United States verifies that this assessment of Trotsky's was correct. The protracted boom was only s temporary restabilization of capitalism and this stabilization was achieved onIy at a very high price which makes the current conjunctural crisis of capitalism all that deeper.
The period we now live in is the period in which the Transitional Program of the Fourth International can become what Trotsky envisioned it as – the program of millions of workers in every country of the world including the United States.
The perspective today of the Socialist Workers Party is opposed on every fundamental to that of Trotsky. Its position is essentially that a "new radicalization" is taking place in the United States which is distinct from the period of the Transitional Program as that period was from the period of Debs – that is, from the period before the triumph of imperialism and the decay of capitalism as an international system. Basing itself on Mandel's theory of neo-capitalism, it sees struggle today around questions of alienation rather than class against class at the point of production in a fight over surplus value itself. It has developed a "new" transitional program of liberal a nationalist demands suited to the radicalization of the middle classes it adapts to.
What is required today is constructing the leadership which through the Transitional Program will build a mass revolutionary party in the United States. It is not enough to note that the SWP has abandoned the Transitional Program, return to this program, and proceed about the business of constructing this mass revolutionary party. This is what the SWP itself attempted at various points to do only to end up in the centrist and opportunist position it is in today. To seek outside of Trotskyism to construct a revolutionary party leads, in one fashion or another, into the blind alley of Stalinism. As the recent history of the Progressive Labor Party illustrates, this, means a complete break with Marxism, with Leninism.
It is not only that Marxist theory is the product of the dialectic method but it develops dialectically. It develops essentially through negation and the negation of the negation as an historical and materialist process. Marxism develops through the struggle against the revision of Marxism and this struggle takes place in the very battle to construct parties rooted in the working class. We can only build a movement today around the Transitional Program if we understand, are completely part of, the struggle historically in the United States for the Transitional Program, the struggle against the revisionism of and abandonment of this program and perspective.
The road to the future lies through absorbing all the lessons of the past. We can only take forward the strength of past struggles if we confront the theoretical weaknesses which have plagued American Marxism from its origins, seeking to build a movement today which breaks through the limitations of past movements.
As this book illustrates time and time again, Marxism has developed in the United States only as part of the construction of an international movement. Each attempt to ignore this lesson and retreat into American radicalism has been disastrous for a revolutionary course in the United States. This book itself is a product of an international struggle and its importance is international in scope.
The Workers League, of which the author of this book is National Secretary, was born in a struggle within the Socialist Workers Party against revisionism in the 1960s. It was an international struggle carried on in collaboration with the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the Socialist Labour League, and the French section OCI. The central theme of this book, that an abandonment of the Marxist method for pragmatism is at the roots of the degeneration of the SWP, comes from this international collaboration. In fact the study which led to writing it was initiated after discussions in England in February 1964. The bulk of the book itself was completed later the same year. The book is thus the collective product of the international movement and our struggle to construct the revolutionary party in the United States.
It is in no sense a complete history of the Socialist Workers Party. This is a very necessary task which still remains to be done. It is particularly inadequate in dealing with the SWP's important role in the trade unions in the 1930s and 1940s. Even much of the internal life of the SWP still remains to be discovered and fully understood.
It is an attempt to study the history of the SWP from the point of view of the relationship of Marxist theory to the development of the party in the United States. Even as this, it is only a beginning but it remains the only beginning. Despite its extensive publishing activity over the seven years since this study was originally written, the SWP has not chosen to produce a history of its own. All there still is is James P. Cannon's anecdotal The History of American Trotskyism written in 1940. The SWP cannot look at its own history. This shows as clearly as anything its degeneration in the direction of Stalinism.
The seven years since the main part of this study was written have witnessed a profound further movement of the Socialist Workers Party from Marxism. At the same time a fundamental new crisis has developed within the United Secretariat supported by the SWP. Therefore it was felt that it would be important to add a relatively extensive section to this study covering this new period. In this way the basic lessons of the past history of the SWP can be taken deeper.
In the seven years since this study was written the Workers League has sought to deepen its understanding of the history of the SWP. One product of this work, "The SWP and the Rise of the CIO," by Dan Fried, is included as an addenda to this book.
We have also produced a series of pamphlets related to the SWP and its history directly or indirectly. Black Nationalism and Marxist Theory discusses the SWP's theory that Blacks are a nation. Revisionism in Crisis not only discusses the new crisis in the United Secretariat but traces the theoretical development of Pabloism over a number of years. Chapter 4 adds new material on the relationship of the SWP to internationalism. Fred Mueller's Stalinism and Trotskyism in the USA includes a discussion on the relation of Cannon and Foster to American pragmatism. Marxism and American Pragmatism discusses SWP's George Novack's position on formal and dialectical logic as well as the meaning of the 1940 struggle in the SWP. What Is Spartacist? is a history not only of that organization, which was expelled from the SWP in 1963, but of the internal struggles within the SWP in that period and the development of the Workers League from its origins as a common tendency with Spartacist to the recent period.
We have published Opportunism and Empiricism, an invaluable collection of the writing of the Socialist Labour League during the 1961 to 1963 international struggle within the International Committee. It also includes the historic "Open Letter" which the SWP issued in 1953 in its split with Pabloism. Another important international document is Gerry Healy's Problems of the Fourth International.
The first pamphlet edition of this study appeared right on the eve of the May-June days in France in 1968. This marked the first shot of the socialist revolution of our time. We venture to predict that this new edition will be followed closely by revolutionary events which go way beyond May-June in France. Thus the urgency for American revolutionaries to take with the greatest seriousness the study of the history of their movement as the only way to prepare the development of the movement into a mass revolutionary party of the American working class.
Trotsky understood so well the necessity for American Trotskyists to break from empiricism and pragmatism if they were to develop a serious Marxist movement. Just as Lenin sat down with Louis Fraina in the midst of the Civil War to discuss dialectics, so it was with Trotsky. In fact he did so immediately upon setting foot on the North American continent. An interesting account of this, not included in this pamphlet, is recorded by William F. Warde in an article written in 1960, "Trotsky's Views on Dialectical Materialism" (International Socialist Review, Fall 1960).
He writes: "January 10, 1937 – the day after Trotsky and his wife Natalia had landed in Mexico. His party was on the troop-guarded private train sent by the Minister of Communications to ensure their safe conduct from Tampico to Mexico City. That sunny morning Shachtman and I sat with Trotsky in one of the compartments, bringing the exile up to date on what had happened during hi s enforced voyage from Norway. Our discussion glided in the subject of philosophy in which he was informed I had a special interest. We talked about the best ways of studying dialectical materialism, about Lenin's 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism' and the theoretical backwardness of American radicalism. Trotsky brought forward the name of Max Eastman who in various works had polemicized against dialectics as a worthless idealist hangover from the Hegelian heritage of Marxism.
"He became tense, agitated. 'Upon going back to the States,' he urged, 'you comrades must at once take up the struggle against Eastman's distortion and repudiation of dialectical materialism. There is nothing more important than this. Pragmatism, empiricism is the greatest curse of American thought. You must innoculate younger comrades against its infection.'
This precisely what the SWP leadership did not do. Thus its degeneration today. It is now the task of the Workers League to carry forward the struggle for dialectical materialism.
T. W. June 28, 1971
Wohlforth Archive | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive