On the politics of the Workers World Party Enter email address
A look at the history of this organization helps explain how and why it
plays this role. The Workers World Party was founded by Sam Marcy in the
early 1960s after he left the Trotskyist movement, with which he had been
associated for over two decades. This was during the period of the postwar
economic boom, the Cold War and the temporary restabilization of world
capitalism. At that time it was necessary for socialists to defend the
USSR against imperialism, but without giving any political support to the
counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy that falsely claimed to speak
for socialism. The Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938,
called on Russian workers to carry through a political revolution to
overthrow the Stalinist regime and establish genuine workers' democracy,
while defending the nationalized property relations established by the
1917 Revolution.
In the mid-1950s Marcy joined those elements within the Fourth
International who began to abandon the struggle against Stalinism,
claiming that in order to fight imperialism it was necessary to adapt to
the Soviet bureaucracy. He rejected the perspective of international
socialism and the revolutionary role of the working class in favor of
supporting the bureaucratic regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, as well as the bourgeois nationalist movements and governments in
the former colonies. Marcy crossed the political Rubicon in 1956, when he
supported the Kremlin's use of Soviet troops to crush the uprising by
Hungarian workers, who had organized workers councils in opposition to the
Stalinist bureaucracy.
Over the past 40 years, the organization founded by Marcy has taken many
twists and turns, but this capitulation to bureaucracy and opposition to
the political independence of the working class remain the unifying
threads in its political activities. Its outlook is dominated by the
perspective of protest politics, bourgeois nationalism and political
opportunism. It covers up for bureaucracy in the US trade unions as well
as abroad. The organization openly backs the dictatorial regime in North
Korea and supported the Serbian nationalist government of Slobodan
Milosevic.
Its opportunist politics have led it to support black capitalist
politicians such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. When Jackson made his
bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, he was
enthusiastically backed by Marcy, who wrote a lengthy article to
“theoretically” justify support for a bourgeois politician. Marcy's
specialty was the using Marxist phraseology to provide a theoretical gloss
for policies that were thoroughly anti-Marxist.
If you carefully examine the statements advanced by WWP representatives at
recent rallies, such as the Emergency Conference held in New York on
February 19 or the Madison Square Garden rally held May 7 to demand a new
trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal, as well as articles in the Workers World
newspaper, you cannot fail to see their political orientation to the
Democratic Party.
Once you go beyond the radical-sounding slogans, what is the content of
the WWP's political line? Consistent with its beginnings in the anti-war
protest milieu of the 1960s, it makes an appeal to the powers-that-be to
change their right-wing political program.
Marxists do not, in principle, oppose the organization of demonstrations
or other forms of protest. We do, however, oppose the use of such methods
to promote a political line that fosters illusions in the trade union
bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. At the May 7 Madison Square Garden
rally, WWP speaker Larry Holmes did precisely that, declaring that mass
action was necessary to force the Democratic and Republican parties to
“put a new trial for Mumia on the agenda” of their nominating
conventions.
It is not difficult to grasp that such a futile perspective, which
obscures the class character of these corporate-controlled parties,
militates against the development of political class consciousness among
working people.
In the United States, a central task of socialists is to fight for the
political independence of the working class by unmasking the Democratic
Party and exposing those, especially the so-called “lefts” like
Jackson,
whose main goal is to keep workers tied to this capitalist party.
In the WWP several ideological tendencies of an essentially reactionary
character converge. These include the outlook of protest politics,
Stalinism, bourgeois nationalism and forms of identity politics such as
black nationalism. All of these are hallmarks of what we have often called
middle-class radicalism, i.e., a political perspective that reflects the
interests not of the working class, but rather of middle class layers that
are dissatisfied with their position in capitalist society, but incapable
of advancing a genuinely revolutionary opposition to the status quo. In
capitalist society, only a program that articulates the independent
interests of the working class and fights to establish the unity of the
working class and its political independence from all sections of the
bourgeoisie—liberal as well as conservative—can provide the basis
for a
revolutionary socialist movement.
This basic truth was confirmed in the positive in the victory of the
working class in the Russian Revolution of 1917, and underscored many
times in the negative, with tragic consequences, in the decades that
followed. What is the central lesson in understanding the triumph of the
October Revolution? It is above all the long and arduous struggle
conducted by Lenin and Trotsky for the development of a socialist culture
in the working class. This entailed a struggle for principled politics
against all those who, in the name of Marxism, subordinated the working
class to sections of the liberal bourgeoisie.
The victory in the late 1920s of the Stalinist faction within the Soviet
Communist Party over the Marxist opposition, led by Trotsky, set the stage
for a counterrevolutionary assault on the Marxist cadre and the Marxist
political program that had made possible the establishment of the Soviet
Union, and inaugurated a process of political reaction and working class
defeats that largely destroyed the socialist political culture that had
been built up by previous generations of Marxists. The Fourth
International alone, embodied today in the Socialist Equality Party and
our co-thinkers in the International Committee of the Fourth
International, defended the theoretical and political conquests achieved
in the struggle against Stalinism and other forms of bureaucracy in the
workers movement.
At the end of your email, you raise the following question: “Is unity not
the key to success?” We agree wholeheartedly that it is critical to unify
the working class. This is, however, impossible if the basic and
irreconcilable antagonism between the working class and its opposite, the
capitalist class, is obscured, either through political support for
liberal representatives of the capitalist class, support for nationalist
programs that help divide the working class along racial lines, the
promotion of gender-based politics, or a combination of the above.
As Marxists, we fight against all forms of discrimination and
inequality—including those based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender or
sexual orientation. The struggle over these questions is part and parcel
of the defense of democratic rights, which remains a central part of the
socialist program. But Marxists defend democratic rights from the
standpoint of the independent interests of the working class, seeking
always to explain that democratic rights can be defended and extended only
through the independent struggle of the working class, based on a strategy
to unite working people internationally against the profit system.
If you seriously examine the politics and methods of the Workers World
Party you will see that it proceeds in quite the opposite manner.
To learn more about the history and program of our party, the Socialist
Equality Party, I would encourage you to read The Heritage We Defend, by
WSWS Editorial Board Chairman David North. You will also find the
following article useful: “Obituary: Sam Marcy, an apologist for
bureaucracy.
Please feel free to correspond further.
Sincerely,
Helen Halyard,
for the WSWS Editorial Board
Top of page
Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. Please send e-mail.
Copyright 1998-2000
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
Karl Carlile
Be free to check out our Communist Think-Tank web site at
http://homepage.eircom.net/~beprepared/
Subscribe to Revcommy Mailing Community at
[log in to unmask]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|