Comments Elsewhere

Patrick,

Just out of curiosity, if “Stalinists” leading the organizing of anti-war protests is the problem, why don’t good sensible liberals in the Democratic leadership quit crying about it and organize their own public demonstrations that they can show up to in good conscience? It’s not like we are talking about people without organizational resources to draw on here.

Geoff,

“Aside from Corn’s reporting that “Paul Donahue, a middle-aged fellow who works with the Thomas Merton Peace and Social Justice Center in Pittsburgh, shouted, ‘Stalinist!’” at a WWP-affiliated speaker at a rally several years ago, he nowhere offers anything resembling evidence for saying that the WWP consists of Stalinists; indeed, nowhere else does he even mention Stalin or Stalinism.”

This requires some digging into the complicated and sometimes rather silly history of sectarian Communist parties in the United States.

The Workers’ World Party is a dissident Communist sect that was founded under the leadership of Sam Marcy in 1959, when it formally split from the Socialist Workers’ Party, the leading Trotskyist organization in the U.S. at the time. For a few years before the formal break the Marcyites had been a dissident faction within the SWP. The split was the result of political turmoil within the Fourth International (due to the failure of World War II to produce global revolution as Trotsky had predicted); the Marcyites decided, with the postwar revolutions in China, North Korea, and Yugoslavia, and the creation of Communist governments in Eastern Europe, that global revolution was on anyway, and aligned themselves with the newly-existing Communist governments, especially in China (and later in Cuba). Since all of these governments except for Yugoslavia’s were Stalinist, that meant aligning themselves with Stalinist parties and Stalinist regimes as the leading edge of the global revolution; thus, while still professing to be Trotskyists in doctrine, they downplayed their opposition to Stalinism. They also came to endorse important tenets of Stalinism, such as the theory of national-state socialism (as opposed to the more strictly internationalist view held by the Trotskyists). The formal break with SWP was mainly caused by Marcy’s support for the Soviet invasion of Hungary (most Trotskyists condemned it as an imperialist assault on workers’ autonomy; the Marcy faction condemned the Hungarian councils and the SWP’s support for them as counterrevolutionary). Over time, WWP support for Trotsky and Trotskyism was even further downplayed (mostly in order to make alliances with Stalinist groups easier). Nevertheless, they never merged with official Stalinist organs (such as the Communist Party USA), and they continue to promote the works of Trotsky, as well as Stalin and Mao, in print. Their official label these days is just “Marxist-Leninist.”

So Corn and the rest are sort of right and sort of wrong when they describe WWP as “Stalinists.” What WWP really are is a rather insular and bizarre Stalinist-Trotskyist hybrid, with a substantial number of positions that are fixed by pure opportunism. In any case the standards of evidence they typically employ are so low that where they’re right, you might as well say they are right by accident. WWP can (sort of) be described as Stalinists, but the mere fact that they issued sycophantic praise for Kim Il Sung no more proves that they are Stalinists than “A Plea for Captain John Brown” proves that Thoreau was a Puritan.

In terms of origins and influences, the WWP are Communists, Marxist-Leninists of a sort, and combine Stalinist, Maoist, and Trotskyist influences. The most apt description for them, though, would probably be “freelance nutcases.”

Hope this helps.