The Struggle Inside the Socialist Workers Party Index | Main Document Index | ETOL Home Page
These documents reflect the effort of the Fourth Internationalist Caucus to clarify and define the growing political divergence between the Barnes faction and the pro-Trotskyist wing of the party. Although the norm in the SWP over the years had always been for the leadership to welcome and encourage such a process of political clarification — confident in its views and confident that a proper discussion would help to educate the entire party membership — in this case the Barnes leadership did everything in its power to block a discussion and slander the opposition.
Its approach to the Leninism question was, once again, typical. Motions proposed by Bloom and Lovell at the November 1981 plenum — to correct the theoretical damage done by the publication of Doug Jenness's article — were rejected on the grounds, among other things, that this was a signed article and therefore represented nothing more than Doug Jenness's personal viewpoint. Yet when Les Evans, a longtime leader of the party who had not been reelected to the National Committee at the 1981 convention, wrote a rebuttal article to Jenness — that is, an article expressing a different “viewpoint” — the editorial board of the ISR refused to publish it. When the Fourth Internationalist Caucus introduced a motion into the next meeting of the National Committee (February-March 1982) directing that the Evans article be published this was rejected by all of the supporters of the Barnes leadership on the NC. NC members even voted down a motion that the article be duplicated and distributed during the plenum so that they themselves could have a chance to read it before making a judgment on its publication.
Likewise, the proposal for an internal literary discussion on this question was rejected. Thus, rather than encouraging a free exchange of views in the party when a dispute arose over a crucial theoretical problem — an exchange that would have been extremely educational for the party ranks — the Barnes faction did everything it could to guarantee that only its point of view was presented and that ideas with which it disagreed were suppressed.
This happened with every point in dispute. What happened around the “workers' and farmers' government” question is another example. Most SWP members were, at best, only vaguely aware of this slogan and its theoretical history. There had certainly been no systematic study of it in the party for many years. That enabled Barnes to characterize the state that emerged in Nicaragua after the 1979 revolution as a “workers' and farmers' government” in a way that ran counter to the Trotskyist conception of permanent revolution, while claiming that he was simply defending the “workers' and farmers' government” idea as discussed by Joseph Hansen — who was a firm adherent and defender of permanent revolution throughout his life. The real political significance of what was being done was difficult or impossible for most SWP members to sort out on their own.
The theses on this question by the Fourth Internationalist Caucus, included here, and the accompanying article by Steve Bloom were designed to clarify the problem. But the party membership was not allowed to read these documents until years after they were written — in fact, not until after virtually the entire opposition had been framed up and expelled from the party.
During the period of time covered by the documents in this section — late 1981 to early 1983 — the campaign of frame-up and expulsion of those who disagreed with the official leadership line, or were even suspected of harboring disagreements, was introduced and rapidly began to have a profound effect on the internal life of the party. That was completely in line with the agenda of the Barnes leadership. In addition to getting rid of those who might support the opposition at any subsequent convention, the purge of the party ranks was designed to poison any discussion that did take place. The goal was to thoroughly prejudice rank-and-file members against the views of the opposition before there was any opportunity for a real exchange of views, and to intimidate those who might still be thinking about aligning themselves with the opposition.
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