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The Socialist Workers Party A Spartacist Pamphlet 75 ¢ . Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116 2 Table of Contents Intr.oduction I n recent years the reformist So­ We are reprinting here as well, with Introduction ........... 2 cialist Workers Party (SWP) of Jack heavy excerpting, the article which Barnes has bureaucratically purged we published immediately following -Reprinted from Workers Vanguard and driven out some hundreds of its Barnes' public speech in December No. 353, 27 April 1984 members, particularly and dispro­ 1982, in which Barnes came out of the portionately those whose allegiance closet as an anti-Trotskyist to vilify From Reformist Betrayals to the SWP goes back to the "old and belittle Trotsky's revolutionary to Overt Repudiation days" before Barnes. This final role and particularly his theory of of Trotskyism destruction of the human links to the "permanent revolution." This speech old party of Leon Trotsky and James was the last straw for many of the Barnes Axes Last P. Cannon takes place some 20 years party veterans. Our article brings Veterans of the after the decisive shift of the SWP off together some of the key quotations Old SWP ............... 3 a revolutionary axis, a shift which from Lenin and Trotsky which can had as its necessary organizational serve as a guide for further study of handmaiden the political expulsion the theory of permanent revolution -Excerpted from Workers Vanguard from the party of the Revolutionary as a central theoretical acquisition of No. 321, 14 January 1983 Tendency. The RT fought inside the the experience of the Bolshevik S W P against the abandonment of the Revolution of 1917 and the devel­ In Defense of Trotskyist program and after its opment of the Left Opposition in Permanent expulsion in 1963 founded the t{te fight against the counterrev­ Revolutiol;t ............ 15 Spartacist League to carry forward o)utionary ideology of Stalinist the programmatic integrity and degeneration. democratic-centralist traditions of As appendices to this pamphlet, we Appendix I Trotskyism in this country. are reprinting two appeals of expul­ The main article reprinted here, sion from the SWP. The first, the -Reproduced from Spartacist "Barnes Axes Last Veterans of the No.1, February-March 1964 1963 Revolutionary Tendency state­ Old SWP," recounts the inside story ment "Rescind the Suspensions!", Rescind the of the recent mass purge whereby reproduced from the first issue of Barnes and his coterie rid themselves Suspensions! ........ 18 Spartaeist, documents the SWP's of virtually everyone who remem­ destruction of the democratic­ bered the old party &nd still main­ centralist norms upheld for 35 years Appendix D tained a sentimental attachment to by the American Trotskyist move­ the old Trotskyism, 20 years after the ment, precisely in order to muzzle -Reprinted from Bulletin In Defense SWP's pretensions to Trotskyism revolutionary opposition to the of Marxism, No.6, April 1984 had been emptied of real program­ SWP's search for substitutes for a matic content. The article places the Appeal of revolutionary working-class perspec­ recent expulsions in the context of tive. The second appendix is the 1984 Expulsion ............. 22 the decisive destruction of SWP "Appeal of Expulsion" by George party democracy by the Farrell Breitman, one of Barnes' new expel­ Dobbs regime in the 1960s, centrally lees and a veteran of many decades in in the expulsion of the Revolutionary the SWP. Comrade Breitman is not Tendency solely for its expressed associated with the Spartacist ten­ political views and in the formal­ dency and stands at a considerable ization of that expulsion in the distance from us programmatically. 1965 organizational resolution, "The Nonetheless we think our readers will Organizational Character of the find his document of interest in Socialist Workers Party," which showing the intimate link between introduced the self-serving elastic Barnes' explicitly anti-Trotskyist standard of "disloyalty" and effec­ public speech in December 1982 and tively banned real factional rights in his organizational "final solution" the party. Without a grasp of this for the party veterans who recoiled crucial juncture of SWP history, from spitting on the watchwords of those seeking belatedly to under­ their revolutionary youth. stand the new purge are groping in the dark. -29 May 1984 3 reprinted./i"oll1 Workers Vanguard No. 353. 27 April 1984 Fromi,~.Reformist Betrayals to Overt Repudiation of Trotskyism Barnes Axes Last Veterans of the Old SWP Jack Barnes has now dispatched the polished off the remainder of a large This mass purge over last Christmas/ last ghost of his party's claims> to crop of SWP oppositionists by a New Year's leaves Barnes' party free to represent the continuity· of the old massive "reregistration" purge of the Ooat off into soft-core Stalinism and Socialist Workers Party (SWP) which residual. mainly rank-and-file. support­ irrelevance while hundreds of recent ex­ once embodied Trotskyism in this ers of two expelled minority currents. members grope around disunitedly in a country. Earlier this year Barnes anc:i his whose main spokesmen had already mainly social-democratic direction; and traveling hatchetman Barry Sheppard been purged earlier: some are even seeking to be Trotskyists. as they understand it. The Barnesites. by their own count. have rid themselves of more than 150 dissidents in the last three years ("List of Splitters," S WP Party Organizer. Volume 8, No. I. January 1984). Among the recently departed are just about everyone left from the old days of the Trotskyist SWP; we can think only of Art Sharon and George Novack (Harry Ring doesn't count) as party veterans who may now remain in Barnes' party. The important political question of the SWP's "Trotskyism" was settled programmatically and organizationally two decades ago. But it wasn't until December 1982 that Barnes dotted the i's and crossed the 1's when he explicitly attacked the theory of "permanent revolution" and belittled the revolution­ ary stature of Leon Trotsky, in classical­ ly Stalinist terms. Upon the death last year of Farrell Dobbs, Barnes' prede­ cessor as head of the SWP. the Barnes­ ites crowed in their Dobbs memorial meetings over the "continuity" of the SWP-from Lenin straight to Dobbs and Barnes, thereby excising Trotsky and SWP founder and leader James P. Cannon from SWP history. Barnes had been moving increasingly overtly to­ ward dumping the SWP's lip-service to Trotskyism. To finish the job required the ouster of the last vestiges of the cadre of the old party, who resisted the invitation to spit on the watchwords of their revolutionary youth. While we enjoy an opponent's faction fight as much as anybody; there's no joy Pathfinder Press in it for us when an SWPer is expelled James P. Cannon, the founding leader of American Trotskyism. for a poem she wrote. another for falling 4 asleep in a Militant forum (anyone of asharp political struggle. The RT was Iy by Mike Harrington's Democratic who's ever attended one can sympathize purged solely for "disloyalty"-i.e., for Socialists (DSA), which has the num­ with this comrade's breach of "disci­ our political views-without the slight­ bers, the inlluential pals among the pline"). Even by established Barnesite est evidence of indiscipline. As the purge labor union tops and the consistent standards, very special savagery has stood flatly in conllict with the 35-year "anti-Stalinist" ideology to be the "left been dished out to the veterans of the tradition of American Trotskyism, the wing of the possible" particularly under old party: e.g .. the obscene treatment of Dobbs regime needed new organiza­ the conditions of Carter/Reagan's James Kutcher, "the legless veteran," tional rules after the fact: Dobbs' 1965 n;surgent anti-Soviet war drive. whose ten-year fight. against govern­ organizational resolution which effec­ The two SWP minority groupings ment witchhunters in the 1940s and tively prohibited factional rights in the emerged mainly in opposition to Barnes' 1950s was backed by significant sections party. We will return to this point later. idiotic union policy of "talking social­ of the labor movement. Now little old ism" on the job and in opposition to the ladies who were SWP members for 50 1981 Pre-Convention SWP's shift, in the mid/late 1970s. years are being turned out of SWP Discussion: "100 Flowers" toward totally slavish adulation of the "public" (orums by open threats of goon Sprout Castroite (Stalinist) regime in Cuba. violence. Under the post-1965 bureaucratic The emergence in Poland of the anti­ In 19S2 the resident anti-Trotskyist "norms" of the SWP, about the only socialist power bid of Solidarnosc expert of the rad-Iib Stalinist Guardian, "loophole" left for organized critics is sharply highlighted the eccentricity of John Trinkl, gloatingly observed that the pre-convention discussion, a three­ Barnes' efforts to simultaneously pursue the SWP "has been quietly dropping month period prior to national conven­ a niche as a "respectable," "peaceful­ overboard some of its Trotskyist bag­ tions, which are mandated for every two legal" party of nativist American refor­ gage" (Guardian, 14 July 1982). To free years. I n the 1981 pre-convention mism while posturing as a partisan of himself up for whatever Barnes thinks is discussion, Barnes found himself with "Soviet surrogates" like the Cuban out there waiting for him, he had to get two sizable minorities on his hands: the _ state. Solidarnosc,. the Polish "company rid not just of the "baggage" but of West Coast-based "Trotskyist Tenden­ union" for the CIA, Western bankers anyone who stiH wanted to tote it, even cy" of Nat Weinstein and Lynn Hender­ and the Vatican, presented the consum­ if they'd long since lost the keys to the son and what.
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