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In anticipation of the opening of the normal preconvention discussion in the spring of 1983 (the party constitution mandated a regular convention every two years, and at least three months of open discussion in the party ranks before the convention was held), the two opposition currents in the National Committee (the Fourth Internationalist Caucus of Lovell and Bloom, and the Trotskyist Tendency of Weinstein and Henderson) decided that they had sufficient common ground to present a united opposition bloc during the preconvention period. The programmatic basis for the bloc was presented to the National Committee as a whole at the start of an NC plenum in May 1983. Two documents, the “Platform to Overcome the Party Crisis” and the “28 Theses on the American Socialist Revolution and Building the Revolutionary Party” were introduced, with the intention that they be published for the party as a whole in the initial preconvention discussion bulletin.
However, this plenum of the National Committee — which should have formally issued the convention call and opened the preconvention discussion — voted instead to recommend to the party membership that the regularly scheduled convention be postponed. That recommendation was formally ratified by a referendum in the party branches a few weeks later.
As a pretext for this action the party leadership contended that the SWP was under such a severe legal attack — as a result of a lawsuit filed in California against the Los Angeles branch — that it might even be necessary to “go underground” in order to protect the vital confidentiality of party records. All of the resources of the organization were necessary to combat this attack, it was argued, and no time or attention could be spared for organizing a convention.
During the entire history of the American Trotskyist movement — which included conditions of extreme harassment and financial deprivation during the 1930s, the imprisonment by the government of the central leadership of the SWP in 1944, World War II, and the witch-hunt of the 1950s, the normal rhythm of party democracy had never been disrupted. Clearly, the reasons given in this case were a pretext. The goal was to gain more time to drive out any shred of opposition and avoid holding an open discussion of the differences that existed in the party. The Barnes faction felt ill-equipped to handle the ideological arguments of the opposition in anything resembling a free and democratic debate.
The documents presented here are, for the most part, a common effort of the two tendencies that made up the Opposition Bloc to define a common program during the spring and early summer of 1983. They reveal that there was a sufficient political basis for such a bloc given its original goal — to provide a principled, united alternative to the perspectives of the majority leadership of the party in the context of a broader discussion in the ranks leading to the party convention.
But the perspectives of the two NC currents never truly merged. The Fourth Internationalist Caucus and the Trotskyist Tendency continued to have their own, differing approaches on many aspects of the problems facing the opposition and facing the party as a whole. And the cancellation of the convention meant that the discussion would not, after all, spread beyond the NC into the party ranks. In that situation the necessity for each of the NC tendencies to maintain its ability to advance its individual goals within the party leadership began to put pressure on their bloc, making it impossible to continue. At the end of the August educational conference that year, a simple statement explaining this fact, and declaring the dissolution of the Opposition Bloc, was presented to the NC.
The Barnes leadership seized on this as a pretext to expel the dissident NC members — though formally they were only “suspended” from the party until a convention was held a year later. The “logic” behind this move went something like this: The Opposition Bloc had actually been a common faction (which it was not, though the Barnes leadership had the NC adopt a resolution declaring it as such when it was formed). Only the most profound political disagreements can justify the breakup of such a faction (which had never, in fact, existed). The statement by the members of the bloc failed to present any such profound political differences (which didn't exist) to justify the breakup of their alleged faction, and therefore they must be keeping their real political positions secret from the party. That is an act of indiscipline and grounds for expulsion.
It was ironic, and appropriate, that this web of Orwellian logic should have been spun in August 1984 — and that the majority of the party National Committee would be willing to swallow such “newthink” without even a single dissenting voice. More and more that kind of procedure was becoming typical of the Barnesite methodology.
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