Marxists’ Internet Archive: ETOL Home Page: Trotskyist Writers Section: Farrel Dobbs
Source: The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 2, 10 January 1949, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcription & Mark-up: Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The party of Norman Thomas is preparing to abandon any pretense of independent class politics and enter the Peoples-Front-type coalition forming on the liberal fringe of the Democratic Party. That is the meaning of the programmatic statement of the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, published in the Dec. 24 Socialist Call.
The statement first examines the results of the presidential election: The Truman victory has brought organized labor “into closer relations with the Democratic Party.” Hopes for a new party “as the expression of liberal and labor interests” must now be postponed for some time to come. The Socialist Party vote was “disappointing.” Therefore, the SP must “create new machinery and outline new strategies,”
Establishment of an “American Socialist Center” is proposed. This “Center” would include the SP, Social Democratic Federation, Jewish Labor Bund, Workmen’s Circle and social-democratic foreign language groups. Contact would be maintained with social democrats abroad, “particularly with those who visit the United States in connection with United Nations proceedings.”
At the same time the SP will “press for full unity at the earliest possible date” with the Social Democratic Federation, which supported Truman in the last election. In previous unity negotiations the SDF refused to continue in a united organization the SP policy of running party candidates for public office. It appears that the SP National Committee is now ready to more or less abandon that policy and accept the SDF line of supporting liberal capitalist politicians.
An internal discussion of “various alternatives” in election tactics has been opened in the SP, to be followed by a national conference around Decoration Day.
Not one word is said in the SP statement about monopoly capitalism’s campaign to tear up the Bill of Rights and militarize America in preparation for a war to conquer the world. The political demands are confined to a “Social Budget for America,” including full employment, full production, adequate housing and “socialization” of steel and coal.
The statement of the National Committee marks the completion of a full stage in the degeneration of the post-Debs Socialist Party from its high point some 12 year’s ago.
Back in 1935–36 the SP moved a little to the, left under pressure of the upsurge in the mass movement. Resolutions against war and capitalism were adopted and revolutionists were invited into the party.
The ultra-conservative right wing of well-heeled lawyers, writers and union officials thereupon split the party, formed the Social Democratic Federation, and supported Roosevelt in the 1936 election.
Freed from the dead weight of the old right wing, and reinforced by new detachments of experienced revolutionary socialists, the SP could have become a dynamic force in the working class political movement. But the Norman Thomas wing shrank from class-struggle policies; clung to their forlorn hope of gradually reforming capitalism toward socialism; imposed gag laws upon the party membership; and in 1937 expelled the revolutionists.
When war came, the party of Norman Thomas shed its pacifist pretenses to openly support American imperialism. Today, they are fellow-travelers of the State Department in the cold war against the Soviet Union. The proposed “Social Budget” is their “socialist” camouflage for that support.
Thomas and his followers have degenerated into war-supporting, middle-class minded liberals. They are rotten-ripe for unity with their blood-brothers of the Social Democratic Federation.
They are prepared ideologically for intimate collaboration with the social-democratic agents of European capitalism and stooges of American imperialism, who “visit the United States in connection with United Nations proceedings.”
The party of Norman Thomas has forfeited any claim to leadership in the revolutionary struggle for socialism.
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