SWP revises position on struggle for labor party

Scan page 10

"The movement for a labor party [in the United States] will continue to grow.

Any revolutionary organization occupying a negative or neutrally expectant position in relation to this progressive movement will doom itself to isolation and sectarian degeneration."—Leon Trotsky, "The Problem of the Labor Party," 10 SOCIALIST ACTION AUGUST 1985 This August, the Socialist Workers Party is holding its second regular national convention since the party leadership expelled all oppositionists loyal to the politics and heritage of the SWP and the Fourth International.

One of the significant revisions introduced into the party's program over the past five years-which the party membership will be asked to ratify at this convention-concerns a major departure from the SWP's historic position on the struggle for a labor party in the United States.

We are reprinting below excerpts from two articles by George Breitman and Jean Y. Tussey on the SWP's new line on the labor party. They appeared in recent issues of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism published by the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (P.O. Box 1317, New York, N. Y. 10009)— The Editors.

The following are excerpts from an article, "The SWP's Disorientation on the Labor Party," which appeared in the June 1985 issue of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism.

The current SWP political resolution, "The Revolutionary Perspective and Leninist Continuity in the United States" (see New International, Spring 1985, pp. 7-97), represents a serious break with revolutionary socialist perspectives and continuity on the crucial question for American workers today, the need for a labor party....

In 1979 the Socialist Workers Party adopted a resolution which clearly explained that the American workers are taking a beating that can only continue and get worse as long as they remain chained, economically and politically, to the false capitalist theory that without private business profits there can be no jobs or democracy.

"Building a Revolutionary Party The following are excerpts from an article, "The SWP's New Position on the Labor Party," which appeared in the May 1985 issue of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism.

A new and different line on the labor party is being introduced, not openly and honestly, but through altered emphasis and unacknowledged reinterpretation of parts of previous positions.

One part of the new line is altogether new; nothing like it has been said by the SWP since it became an advocate of an independent labor party in 1938. That is the claim that the emergence of a labor party with a reformist program would constitute a "barrier" to independent working-class political action.

That changes the whole concept of independent working-class political action. Consider what is being said:

If the working class or an important segment of it breaks with the capitalist parties and creates a party of its own, based on the unions and their allies, and their program is reformist rather than revolutionary, then that—according to the authors of the 1985 resolution—is not independent working-class political action.

This means that nothing except a revolutionary party can be said to engage MILITANT April 1938.

Socialist Workers" was the title and focus of the 1979 resolution. It stated:

"A powerful base for a labor party already exists: the unions.

They have millions of members, established newspapers, and financial resources.

"A labor party will not come into being simply because it is objectively needed, however, or because it already has a potential organized base. Some section of the union movement, a vanguard, must act to get a labor party started....

"The first steps toward a labor party can occur... as an independent labor campaign based on a particular union or union local, or in a particular city. Yet if such an in independent working-class politics.. initiative has a clear perspective, it will have the potential to set an example that can spread to other unions and other parts of the country....

"A revolutionary working-class party cannot be built in this country apart from the fight for a class-struggle left wing in the unions, which includes the perspective of an independent labor party (my emphasis-J.Y.T.).

"The actual initiation of a labor party would dramatically shift the relationship of class forces in this country, opening the way to more rapid growth of the revolutionary-socialist party."

The January 1985 political resolution picture.

The 1985 resolution records a retreat from the party's revolutionary-socialist perspective and Leninist-Trotskyist contributions for the United States, to strange non-Marxist concepts of spontaneity that provide no clear guide for action to transform the unions nor for building a revolutionary party of socialist workers.

The concept of a labor party is disposed of in a polemic against the "Stranglehold of Electoralism."

"In order to represent a real step forward for labor and its allies" we are told, "independent working-class political action cannot be reduced to a question of organizational separation from the Democratic and Republican parties."

While "support for the candidates of the two capitalist parties is one of the primary forms taken by class-collabora tionist politics at election time", a labor party alternative to the two capitalist parties is not too important since "this is only a small part of the trap of electoralism."

Similarly, "the emergence of a labor party with a reformist program in the United States would place a new barrier in the path of independent working-class political action, we are told.

It is untrue that a break from the Democratic and Republican parties through the formation of an independent labor party based on today's unions would not be a major advance in class consciousness by the American workers.

It is wrong...to tell industrial workers in the United States...that a labor party without a clear program for a revolutionary workers' and farmers' government is a bourgeois electoralist trap and an obstacle to "real" independent political action.

It is incorrect to substitute for the transitional program and method the pragmatic and vulgar materialist notion that North American industrial workers will have to continue to take a beating until they are reduced to conditions analogous to those of the Nicaraguans under Somoza or the Cubans under Batista before they will "acquire revolutionary combat experience and their consciousness will be transformed."

("Collected Works, 12, 35).

----- pull-quotes -----

Marxist view of labor party