The Struggle Inside the Socialist Workers Party Index | Main Document Index | ETOL Home Page
As a result of their experience with the new Castroist line after the 1979 SWP convention, a number of experienced comrades began to have serious doubts about the direction in which the Barnes leadership was taking the party. Enough things had been said, written, and done during the intervening period to force some of the more thoughtful party members and leaders to ask: What was really behind the proposal to characterize Castroism as “revolutionary”?
The role that Breitman had played in 1979 made him the obvious person to take the lead in reraising that question. He did so with a set of proposed amendments to the general political resolution that was being submitted to the party by the majority of the National Committee. Without again taking up the terminological problem, the “Breitman amendments” tried, as his previous article on the question of centrism had done, to define clearly the relationship between Castroism and Trotskyism — both on an ideological and organizational level.
This time Breitman received some support — both in the formal leadership and from the party ranks. Five delegates were elected to the convention on the basis of his amendments. Another opposition tendency — led by Nat Weinstein and Lynn Henderson — elected the same number of delegates. The Weinstein-Henderson opposition had made a more far-ranging critique of the party leadership, objecting to the way work was being carried out in trade union and other mass arenas of struggle, as well as concerning itself with international questions such as Cuba and the correct approach to the Nicaraguan revolution.
One of the most significant exchanges in the discussion during the 1981 convention was provoked by the Weinstein-Henderson tendency when it asked, point-blank, if the party leadership was considering an abandonment of Trotskyism and the theory of permanent revolution. The majority reporter at the convention gave a categorical “no” in reply. In light of what happened in the next few weeks and months it is clear that this was an outright lie. But the Barnes leadership was not yet willing to reveal its entire programmatic and theoretical agenda to the party.
Immediately after the convention the anti-Trotskyist indoctrination began in earnest. This took the form of “Lenin classes,” in which party branches held discussions about “Leninism” based solely on a list of readings prepared by the national education department in New York. These readings extracted very selectively from Lenin's works. The goal was to resurrect Lenin's pre-1917 theory of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” and to convince SWP members that this was the proper theoretical reference point for the Marxist movement in the 1980s, rather than Trotsky's conception of permanent revolution.
Party members who tried to dispute this official interpretation during the “educational” sessions were denounced as disrupters. In particular, any attempt to bring in Lenin's own theoretical evolution during the 1917 revolution, any effort to discuss the “official” readings in their specific historical context, was ruled out of order.
If there had been any ambiguity about whether all of this was, indeed, a veiled attack on Trotskyism it was dispelled in the autumn of 1981 when Doug Jenness — a longtime faithful supporter of Barnes in the party leadership — wrote an article for the party's theoretical journal, International Socialist Review, commemorating the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. In this article he failed to mention Trotsky's role as a central leader of that struggle. Trotsky was mentioned only once — as a historian who wrote about the revolution. And Jenness openly hailed Lenin's theory of the “Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry” as the theoretical basis for the Russian Revolution — completely ignoring Lenin's own transformation of his position in the famous April Theses.
We will not here go into this general theoretical question of the relationship between the democratic dictatorship and permanent revolution any further. The substance is taken up in the article by Les Evans in Part III of this volume. What is important for the reader to keep in mind in reading these particular documents is the way in which the Barnes leadership's new views on the question were kept hidden until immediately after the 1981 convention — that is, until the regular period of open written and oral discussion in the party had come to an end. That meant that there would be no opportunity for those who disagreed with the new positions to openly challenge them before the party ranks. This was conscious and planned.
The clear evolution of the party leadership on such an important theoretical matter, combined with a number of other political questions that became clarified only after the 1981 convention, led Steve Bloom and Frank Lovell (who had been elected to the party National Committee at the 1981 convention as representatives of the current that supported the Breitman amendments) to broaden their critique of the majority leadership. At the first National Committee meeting after the convention — in November 1981 — some of these broader issues were already apparent. Shortly thereafter, in December, Bloom and Lovell drafted a formal declaration stating that they represented a specific current of thought inside the party. That “Platform of the Fourth Internationalist Caucus” is the last item in Part II.
The Struggle Inside the Socialist Workers Party Index | Main Document Index | ETOL Home Page | Marxists’ Internet Archive