Build the Part - Time
1985 1985-08Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 10 →
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For an entire century the most perceptive elements in the Marxist movement, both here and abroad, have agreed on one thing about the labor party question in the United States: that it would be progressive, not a barrier, for the workers in this country to break with the capitalist parties and launch a party of their own, even if its program was inadequate from a revolutionary standpoint.
What Engels said We can start with Frederick Engels 99 years ago, when there was an upsurge of struggle by U.S. workers, and when he thought... that the workers were possibly on the verge of creating their own political party. In letters to his American comrades, Engels wrote:
"The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the constitution of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers' party."
("Letters to Americans 18481895"' International Publishers, 1953, p. 163)
"A million or two of workingmen's votes next November for a bona fide workingmen's party is worth infinitely more at present than a hundred thousand votes for a doctrinally perfect platform....
"Anything that might delay or prevent that national consolidation of the workingmen's partyFLICAN rtoon by Laura Gray in the SWP's wspaper in 1944.
on no matter what platform-l should consider a great mistake.." ("Letters to Americans,, p. 167).
What Lenin said Engels was not the only enemy of reformism who had such an opinion. Let us jump ahead 21 years, to 1907, when Lenin wrote a preface to a collection that included the above letters by Engels. Lenin was in full agreement with Engels' position on a U.S. labor party:
"Engels stressed the importance of an independent workers' party, even with a poor programme, because he was speaking of countries where there had formerly been not even a hint of the workers' political independence and where, in politics, the workers mostly dragged along behind the bourgeoisie, and still do.
"In such countries Marx and Engels taught the socialists to rid themselves at all costs of narrow sectarianism, and to join with the working-class movement so as to shake up the proletariat politically ("Collected Works, Vol. 12, pp.
372-73).
For these reasons Lenin favored a U.S. labor party, "even with a poor programme" not only in 1907 but also in 1920 and 1921, at the time of the Comintern's second and third world congresses.
According to Theodore Draper, Lenin suggested then that the CP should work for a labor party in the United States. And he did not insist that it could only be a party with a revolutionary program. ("American Communism and Soviet Russia, Viking Press, 1960, p. 32)
It is hardly necessary to quote Trotsky on this matter since transcripts of his 1938 talks with SWP leaders on why they should fight for a labor party are available in the book "The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution" (Pathfinder Press, 1977).
Such a perspective is obviously quite different from the one introduced in the 1985 resolution. The 1979 SWP resolution [quoted in Jean Tussey's articleThe Editors] stimulates active participation in the labor movement to try to actually help form a labor party, while the latest document encourages dogmatic abstention until some ideal form of labor party comes along.