New Pathways

chapter 3 New Pathways

Paul Le Blanc

As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the early stages of the youth radicalization were in full swing – widespread involvement in civil rights struggles, defense and active use of civil liberties, opposition to nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war, challenging ‘the American Century’ thrust of US foreign policy, support for ‘third world’ liberation struggles, cultural rebellion (including, for some, participation in a rich folk music trend), growing struggles for educa- tional and campus reform, and college and university students, etc.1 Within this context, the significantly expanding number of young Trotsky- ists were active in all of these activities and working to help build a young socialist movement – culminating in a Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). First experimenting with a regroupment ethos that would reflect a broad range of perspectives, the group quickly reoriented to become openly and explicitly aligned with the Socialist Workers Party – as discussed in the report by lead- ing participant Tim Wohlforth presented here.2 Engagement with the civil rights and black liberation struggles in the United States shaped much of the evolving ‘new left’ that was growing powerfully in the United States, and this was also central to the new growth in US Trotskyism. As previously noted, an entire chapter of the present volume focuses on these ‘Challenges of Black Liberation’, although references to such realities necessar- ily pepper items in the present chapter too. As indicated in the 1960 essay by Frances James, ‘Africa’s Bid for Freedom’, US Trotskyists were among those who perceived the ferment and insurgency among African-Americans as dovetailing with similar ferment and insurgency sweeping through the colonial and former colonial regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.3

1 On the history of the radicalization of this period, see: Gosse 2005; Bloom and Breines 2003; Sale 1973; and Cantwell 1996. 2 Information on the formation and early period of the Young Socialist Alliance can be found in: Wohlforth 1994, pp. 51–122; Camejo 2010, pp. 23–36; Sheppard 2005, pp. 11–97; Williams 1973. 3 African-American author Richard Wright wrote three books in this period relevant to this theme: Black Power (1954); The Color Curtain (1956); and White Man, Listen! (1957). They are collected in Wright 2008. W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon were also in the vanguard on

The Cuban Revolution was a defining feature of this period, and a major- ity within the SWP came to identify with it deeply and powerfully, although not uncritically. This comes through in Joseph Hansen’s review of two early books on the revolution, C.Wright Mills’s ListenYankee, and Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution by MonthlyReview editors Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy.Hansen’s own evolving and influential analysis, gathered in the 1978 collection Dynam- ics of the Cuban Revolution (published the same year as his death), manifesting an extremely positive understanding of strengths in the revolution and in the revolutionaries (Marxist-influenced, but not Stalinist) who made it, is at the same time tempered with an underlying critical edge informed by the analyt- ical approach absorbed from Trotsky. His comrade George Weissman, under the name George Lavan, would soon edit the bestselling collection Che Guevara Speaks (a sort of companion piece with his friend George Breitman’s Malcolm X Speaks, indicating SWPers’ successful outreach and influence in this period).4 In this same period, Hansen began elaborating a new conceptualization of ‘the workers and farmers government’, a term which had its roots in the early Communist International, but which he sought to creatively develop in order to account for unexpected postwar realities. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and others had originally utilized a number of terms as synonyms: workers’ state, dictatorship of the proletariat, workers’ rule, workers’ democracy. Later, in the 1939–40 debates, Trotsky argued that even though a bureaucratic dictatorship had politically disenfranchised the working class in the USSR, the country was a bureaucratically degenerated workers’ state, because the social-economic con- quests of the 1917 revolution (particularly a nationalized and planned economy, combined with a variety of social gains) remained intact. He argued that this workers’ state should be defended (1) in any conflict with capitalist-imperialist powers, and (2) by carrying out a political revolution to overthrow the bureaucratic dictatorship and replace it with genuine, democratic workers’ rule. Hansen utilized this to argue that a workers’ state involves two components: (a) workers’ rule replacing capitalist rule politically; and (b) the transition from a privately-owned market economy to a nationalized, planned economy. He went on to utilize the term ‘workers and farmers government’ to describe a

such matters, as brilliantly demonstrated in Hudis 2015 and Mullen 2016. On African liberation struggles of this period, see Davidson 1978. An informative and influential work on Latin America, also from this period, is Gerassi 1963. 4 Hansen 1979 and Lavan 1968. For biographies of Hansen and Weissman, see Lubitz 2004, and Editors of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism 1985. For additional material on the Cuban Revolution itself, and post-revolution developments, see: Huberman and Sweezy 1969; Karol 1970; Habel 1991; Fitzgerald 1994; Farber 2006; and Le Blanc 2007.