Stealth Trot­sky­ism and the Mys­tery of the WWP

by Kevin Coogan

One of the many ironies of the IAC/WWP story is that a group now aligned with some of the most dog­matic ele­ments in what’s left of the Left is itself most likely run by secret Trot­sky­ists. Given the hermit-like qual­ity of the WWP, it’s hard to know for sure. Even accu­rate esti­mates of the group’s mem­bers are hard to come by.

In the 1980s most con­ven­tional esti­mates were that it had some­where between three and four hun­dred fol­low­ers. Thanks to the IAC in par­tic­u­lar, the WWP’s recruit­ing efforts over the past decade have met with some suc­cess, espe­cially in New York and San Fran­cisco. If both actual WWP mem­bers and fel­low trav­el­ers are counted, the group may now deploy up to a thou­sand cadres, if not more.

Inso­far as the WWP has had dif­fi­culty in recruit­ing, it may be due in part to the extremely closed and clan­nish nature of its lead­er­ship. Nowhere is this fact more evi­dent then when it comes to dis­cussing the group’s ori­gin. For some rea­son the WWP exer­cises great cir­cum­spec­tion when it comes to acknowl­edg­ing its ori­gins as a fac­tion inside the Trot­sky­ist Social­ist Work­ers Party (SWP).

The WWP’s lead­ers even obscure their back­ground to their own mem­bers. In the May 6th, 1986 WW, for exam­ple, the paper began a lengthy four-part series osten­si­bly ded­i­cated to explain­ing the WWP’s his­tory. Not once in the entire series was it ever men­tioned that the WWP first emerged out of the Social­ist Work­ers Party or that the group’s founders had spent over a decade as a fac­tion inside the SWP.

Yet the WWP’s analy­sis of the Soviet Union strongly sug­gests that the sect never aban­doned the world­view that its found­ing lead­ers first acquired while still inside the SWP. This issue, how­ever, remains so sen­si­tive that fol­low­ing the death of WWP founder Sam Marcy on Feb­ru­ary 1st, 1998, not one WWP memo­r­ial speech men­tioned that Marcy had ever been in the SWP, much less a for­mer mem­ber of the party’s National Committee.

The bizarre nature of the WWP’s attempt to con­ceal its ori­gins is only height­ened by the fact that vir­tu­ally every­thing writ­ten about the group by out­side com­men­ta­tors notes its begin­nings inside the SWP. One of the rare aca­d­e­mic dis­cus­sions of the WWP’s his­tory comes in a sur­vey book by Robert Alexan­der which is aptly titled Inter­na­tional Trotskyism.

The mys­tery of the WWP begins with Sam Marcy, who dom­i­nated the orga­ni­za­tion from its offi­cial incep­tion in 1959 until his death at age 86 in 1998. Born in 1911 in Rus­sia into an extremely poor Jew­ish fam­ily, “Com­rade Sam” grew up in Brook­lyn. After spend­ing time in the CPUSA’s Young Com­mu­nist League (YCL), Marcy joined the SWP in either the late 1930s or 1940s.

Trained as a lawyer, he served as a legal coun­sel and orga­ni­za­tional sec­re­tary for a local United Paper Work­ers Union. Dur­ing this time he met his wife Dorothy Bal­lan, who also came from an immi­grant Russian-Jewish fam­ily. Although Bal­lan (who died in 1992) grad­u­ated from Hunter Col­lege with a degree in edu­ca­tion, she joined the United Paper Work­ers to spread the Marx­ist gospel. Fol­low­ing tra­di­tional Left “indus­trial col­o­niza­tion” tac­tics, Marcy and Bal­lan next moved to Buf­falo and began recruit­ing work­ers in indus­trial plants there into the SWP. By the late 1940s, how­ever, the anti-communist back­lash that would cul­mi­nate in McCarthy­ism made their work inside the trade union move­ment vir­tu­ally impossible.

Despite these polit­i­cal set­backs, Marcy and his fel­low Buf­falo SWP com­rades (most notably Vince Copeland) became increas­ingly con­vinced that the world had entered a new period of rev­o­lu­tion­ary class strug­gle, par­tic­u­larly fol­low­ing the Chi­nese Rev­o­lu­tion. The out­break of the Korean War in 1950 has­tened the emer­gence of what was known in the SWP as the Marcy/Copeland “Global Class War” ten­dency. The Buffalo-based “global class war­riors” called on the SWP to down­play its dif­fer­ences with Stal­in­ist regimes and forge a joint front against “U.S. Imperialism.”

Global Class War’s fun­da­men­tal point was that the geopo­lit­i­cal defense of “really exist­ing social­ism” took pri­or­ity over the Trot­sky­ist argu­ment that put a pre­mium on pro­mot­ing class strug­gles inside the Soviet bloc against the dom­i­nant Stal­in­ist bureau­cracy. Marcy and Copeland’s posi­tion might be best described as “semi-entrist” because although they very much wanted to court the Stal­in­ist states, they rejected any argu­ment that called on Trot­sky­ists to enter the CPUSA en masse.

What the Global Class War argu­ment meant in prac­tice became clear dur­ing the 1956 Hun­gar­ian Rev­o­lu­tion. The SWP major­ity sup­ported the upris­ing as a stu­dent and worker-led revolt against Stal­in­ist oppres­sion. The Global Class War fac­tion, how­ever, com­pletely dis­agreed. A Trot­sky­ist named Fred Mazelis recalled Marcy telling him in 1959 that “the Hun­gar­ian work­ers were hope­less coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies and that we should sup­port the Stal­in­ists in their crush­ing of the Hun­gar­ian work­ers councils.”

Accord­ing to another for­mer SWP’er named Tim Wohlforth, “Marcy had decided that the Hun­gar­ian Rev­o­lu­tion was basi­cally a Fas­cist upris­ing and that as defend­ers of the Soviet Union, Trot­sky­ists had a duty to sup­port Soviet inter­ven­tion.” The WWP’s 1959 found­ing state­ment (reprinted in a 1959 issue of WW under the head­ing “Pro­le­tar­ian Left Wing of SWP Splits, Calls for Return to Road of Lenin and Trot­sky”) explained that while it was OK to sup­port demands for “pro­le­tar­ian democ­racy,” once the Hun­gar­i­ans began demand­ing “bour­geois polit­i­cal democ­racy,” the cor­rect Trot­sky­ist pol­icy was to sup­port “the final inter­ven­tion of the Red Army which saved Hun­gary from the cap­i­tal­ist counterrevolution.”

In other words, if 99.9% of the Hun­gar­ian peo­ple wanted to over­throw Russ­ian dom­i­na­tion and pre­vent Hun­gary from being a satrapy of Moscow, intro­duce a demo­c­ra­tic par­lia­men­tary sys­tem, and adopt an eco­nomic sys­tem that worked, they were morally wrong; in con­trast, the Soviet troops who shot down unarmed Hun­gar­ian stu­dent and worker pro­test­ers were morally right.

In its found­ing state­ment, the WWP also denounced the SWP’s attempts to engage in coali­tion elec­toral cam­paigns with a group of for­mer CP“ers (known as the „Gates fac­tion“ after its leader, John Gates) who had bro­ken from the CPUSA after the 20th Soviet Party Con­gress par­tial rev­e­la­tions about Stalin’s mas­sive crimes.

Accord­ing to WW, how­ever, the real “rightwing” trend inside the Soviet Union actu­ally began after Stalin’s death with the rise of Khrushchev! The WWP’s found­ing state­ment fur­ther noted that while Stal­in­ism “may be the­o­ret­i­cally as wrong as social democ­racy,” social democ­rats were “con­sid­ered friendly to Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism and the Stal­in­ists are con­sid­ered hos­tile.” Ergo, Stal­in­ism was bet­ter than social democracy.

After break­ing with the SWP, the tiny WWP sought to ally itself with pro-Stalinist and anti-Khrushchev ele­ments still inside the CPUSA who were angry about Amer­i­can CP leader William Foster’s refusal to openly crit­i­cize the Khrushchev “revi­sion­ists.” Around the time that the WWP was cre­ated, a splin­ter group called the Pro­vi­sional Orga­niz­ing Com­mit­tee to Recon­sti­tute a Marxist-Leninist Party in the United States (POC) “bet­ter known as the “Van­guard” group” split from the CPUSA and embraced China’s anti-Khrushchev, “anti-revisionist” line. Although the WWP sup­ported the Chi­nese posi­tion, the Van­guard group refused all of its polit­i­cal over­tures because they viewed the WWP as trea­so­nous “Trot­skyites”! Not long there­after, the WWP began remov­ing Trotsky’s pic­ture along with any ref­er­ences to him in party publications.

Now thor­oughly iso­lated from the rest of the Left, Marcy led his lit­tle group with a strong hand. Tim Wohlforth met Marcy in 1959 at an SWP con­ven­tion held at a New Jer­sey sum­mer camp shortly before the Global Class War clique broke with the SWP.
As Wohlforth later recalled in his mem­oir, The Prophet’s Chil­dren, while at the camp he had come upon a small mass of peo­ple “mov­ing like a swarm of bees” and deeply engaged in con­ver­sa­tion. In the mid­dle of the mass “was a lit­tle ani­mated man talk­ing non­stop” who had a “high-pitched voice” and “spoke in a com­pletely hys­ter­i­cal man­ner.” Yet Marcy’s devoted fol­low­ers seemed “enthralled by his per­for­mance. . .It was my first expe­ri­ence with true polit­i­cal cult followers.”

From its incep­tion, the WWP attacked any and all lib­er­al­iza­tion ten­den­cies in Com­mu­nist Bloc nations and scram­bled to be first in line to applaud crack­downs on dis­si­dent move­ments. The April 1959 issue of WW even ran an edi­to­r­ial prais­ing the bru­tal Chi­nese sup­pres­sion of Tibet’s inde­pen­dence move­ment. As for the Soviet Union, the WWP reg­u­larly attacked the entire spec­trum of dis­si­dent thinkers from Solzhen­it­syn to Sakharov. The WWP line was that the dis­si­dents really reflected broader „rightwing forces“ per­co­lat­ing inside the Soviet CP itself. In a Feb­ru­ary 22nd, 1974 essay, Marcy noted that Khrushchev’s ‘so called democ­ra­ti­za­tion“ had „opened up a Pandora’s box of bour­geois reac­tion, not only in the Soviet Union but even more vir­u­lently in East­ern Europe.“

The WWP fully sup­ported the 1968 Soviet inva­sion of Czecho­slo­va­kia, when Russ­ian tanks crushed the Dubcek Regime and with it „Prague Spring.“ Need­less to say, it also fiercely opposed the Pol­ish Sol­i­dar­ity move­ment in the 1980s. The WWP’s true love through­out the 1960s was Maoist China, with North Korea a close sec­ond. The WWP even opposed the sign­ing of the 1963 U.S.-Soviet Test Ban Treaty because it would bar China from acquir­ing nuclear weapons!

When the Chi­nese exploded their first H-bomb in 1967, WW declared it to be „a major vic­tory for social­ism.“ The party was par­tic­u­larly enthu­si­as­tic about China’s dis­as­trous „Cul­tural Rev­o­lu­tion,“ so much so that as late as the WWP’s 1986 party con­fer­ence, Mao’s wife Chang Ching (a Cul­tural Rev­o­lu­tion enthu­si­ast and „Gang of Four“ leader) was sin­gled out for spe­cial praise.

As much as the WWP admired China, it despised Israel. WWP cadre proudly car­ried signs in sup­port of al-Fath that read “Israel = Tool of Wall Street Rule” and “Hitler-Dayan, Both the Same.” A June 24th, 1967 WW edi­to­r­ial fol­low­ing the Six Day War stated that Israel “is not the state of the Jew­ish nation,” but a state “that oppresses Jew­ish work­ers as well as Arabs.”

The fact that Israel was largely cre­ated by Social­ist Zion­ists and in 1967 was led by Labor Party Pre­mier Golda Meir (a woman some­thing unthink­able in the Arab world), whose polit­i­cal base was the Social Demo­c­ra­tic Israeli trade union move­ment, did not mat­ter. Nor did it mat­ter that every Arab state that opposed Israel had sys­tem­at­i­cally crushed all inde­pen­dent labor unions or that “pro­gres­sive” Arab gov­ern­ments like Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasr’s Egypt had a long record of employ­ing Nazis both to train its mil­i­tary and secu­rity forces and to spread anti-Semitic hate pro­pa­ganda through­out the Mid­dle East.

As the WW edi­to­r­ial explained, “The fact that many of the Arab states are still ruled by con­ser­v­a­tive or even reac­tionary regimes does not mate­ri­ally affect this posi­tion” of sup­port, because the Arabs “are strug­gling against impe­ri­al­ism, which is the main enemy of human progress,” whereas Israel “is on the side of the oppressors.”

This same edi­to­r­ial went on to assert that “When the bosses on a world scale” i.e., the impe­ri­al­ists “ go to war with the oppressed colo­nial and semi-colonial nations, it makes lit­tle dif­fer­ence who fires the first shot, as far as the rights and wrongs of the mat­ter are con­cerned. . .Nat­u­rally, the impe­ri­al­ists were the orig­i­nal aggres­sors in every case.” Some two decades later, the WWP would use vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal argu­ments to jus­tify sup­port­ing Sad­dam Husayn.

The WWP’s remark­able capac­ity for Orwellian “dou­ble think” was by no means lim­ited to the issue of the Soviet Union or Israel. Take gay lib­er­a­tion, for exam­ple. Start­ing in the early 1970s the WWP actively recruited many gay and les­bian fol­low­ers, since para­dox­i­cally enough the group had a fairly advanced posi­tion on this issue.

The sect’s recruit­ment suc­cesses in this area came about in part because most of the other ultra-left groups com­pet­ing with the WWP were ortho­dox Maoists who endorsed the Stalinist/Maoist line that homo­sex­u­al­ity was a sex­ual per­ver­sion caused by deca­dent cap­i­tal­ism that would be swiftly cured come the rev­o­lu­tion. Yet even though WWP cadres fre­quently pro­moted them­selves as gay or les­bian, the WWP refused to crit­i­cize the noto­ri­ously repres­sive prac­tices directed against homo­sex­u­als in China, North Korea, and Cuba, much less in Ser­bia or Iraq.

Per­haps the ulti­mate absur­dity of the WWP, how­ever, is that the stealth Trot­sky­ism of its lead­er­ship actu­ally saved the sect from col­lapse in the late 1970s. In the 1960s the WWP, pri­mar­ily through two key front groups, Youth Against War and Fas­cism (YAWF) and the Amer­i­can Servicemen’s Union (ASU), man­aged to recruit a fair amount of new mem­bers who were drawn to the group less by its the­o­ries than by the extreme mil­i­tancy of its street actions. Indeed, YAWF’s one notable con­tri­bu­tion to the Stu­dents for a Demo­c­ra­tic Soci­ety (SDS) was that it was the only group which sup­ported the Weath­er­man at the dis­as­trous SDS con­ven­tion in Chicago in the sum­mer of 1969.

YAWF also par­tic­i­pated in the Weatherman-organized “Days of Rage” protest that same autumn. With the end of the Viet­nam War, how­ever, the entire Amer­i­can Left began to suf­fer an enor­mous down­turn, and the WWP was no excep­tion to the rule. The cadre-based Left was fur­ther weak­ened by the rise of new social move­ments like women’s lib­er­a­tion, gay lib­er­a­tion, and the anti-nuclear and ecol­ogy move­ments, all of which oper­ated orga­ni­za­tion­ally and ide­o­log­i­cally out­side the tra­di­tional frame­work of ortho­dox Marx­ism, much less that of author­i­tar­ian Marxist-Leninist sects.

Faced with the chal­lenge of wide­spread de-radicalization, as well as the growth of new social move­ments, the WWP (like many other Marx­ist sects) took an „indus­trial turn“ and ordered its fol­low­ers back into the labor move­ment. The WWP even cre­ated the Cen­ters for United Labor Action (CULA) to help coor­di­nate these efforts.

Yet iron­i­cally, what ulti­mately gave the WWP a sec­ond lease on life was the death of Mao and the sub­se­quent ide­o­log­i­cal cri­sis inside post-Mao China that finally resulted in the defeat of the „Gang of Four.“ The WWP’s com­peti­tors in ortho­dox Maoist grou­plets like the Octo­ber League rapidly ran out of ide­o­log­i­cal steam as the new post-Mao Chi­nese lead­er­ship moved even closer to the United States. After China began aid­ing Amer­i­can and South African-backed move­ments like UNITA, and Chi­nese troops tried to invade Viet­nam, ortho­dox Mao­ism became even harder to rationalize.

Thanks to the WWP’s stealth Trot­sky­ism, how­ever, the group man­aged to escape polit­i­cal obliv­ion by reori­ent­ing itself away from China and toward the Soviet Bloc with rel­a­tive ease.
The WWP’s great advan­tage in the post-1977 period was that through­out its entire his­tory it only con­cealed „ but never aban­doned „ its basic Trot­sky­ist ide­ol­ogy. Ortho­dox Mao­ism, it should be recalled, main­tained that with the death of Stalin the Soviet Union had ceased to be social­ist state. Maoists even went so far as to claim that, thanks to „Khrushchevite revi­sion­ism,“ the USSR had been trans­formed into „a social-imperialist state“ not unlike Tsarist Russia.

The WWP, how­ever, com­pletely rejected this view even while it was busily glo­ri­fy­ing ultra-Maoist groups like China’s „Gang of Four“ for their rev­o­lu­tion­ary zeal. In a May 1976 WW arti­cle, for exam­ple, Marcy reasserted the Trot­sky­ist posi­tion (nat­u­rally with­out iden­ti­fy­ing it as such) against the stan­dard Maoist argu­ment. More specif­i­cally, he rejected
the idea „that there is a new exploit­ing class in the Soviet Union,“ and that there had been a „return to the bour­geoisie to power there.“

The real­ity was that the USSR still remained „a work­ers“ state“ whose „under­ly­ing social sys­tem. . .is infi­nitely supe­rior to that of the most devel­oped, the most „glo­ri­ous“ and the most „demo­c­ra­tic“ of the impe­ri­al­ist states.“ At the same time (again fol­low­ing Trot­sky) he admit­ted that Rus­sia had under­gone „a severe strain, dete­ri­o­ra­tion, and ero­sion of rev­o­lu­tion­ary prin­ci­ples, and [was] more­over headed by a priv­i­leged and abso­lutist bureaucracy.

Marcy’ later rejec­tion of Gor­bachev as a “cap­i­tal­ist restora­tionist” in the late 1980s was not all that dis­sim­i­lar to Trotsky’s attack on Bukharin not Stalin in books like The Rev­o­lu­tion Betrayed as the main threat to social­ism in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

The WWP’s brand of covert Trot­sky­ism would prove cru­cial to its future growth. In the late 1970s, its ide­ol­ogy allowed the sect to attach itself like a pilot fish to Soviet and Cuban-allied orga­ni­za­tions and avoid polit­i­cal anni­hi­la­tion either from the atro­phy of its mem­ber­ship or from a dev­as­tat­ing polit­i­cal schism.

The WWP’s switch from Mao’s China to Brezhnev’s Rus­sia was so remark­able that in 1984 the sect, which not long before was singing the praises of the Gang of Four, now pub­licly endorsed Jesse Jack­son for Pres­i­dent! Finally, when the CPUSA itself split into pieces in the late 1980s, the WWP was in a posi­tion to exploit the new sit­u­a­tion for max­i­mum polit­i­cal profit.
Con­clu­sion

Given the WWP’s world­view, the notion that a group as closely linked to the WWP as the Inter­na­tional Action Cen­ter could ever be taken seri­ously, either as a „human rights“ or „peace“ orga­ni­za­tion, seems com­i­cal as well as grotesque. The all too „resistible rise“ of the IAC/ WWP, how­ever, only makes sense when it is viewed in the con­text of the broader col­lapse of Soviet-style Marx­ism and all of its ide­o­log­i­cal vari­ants. Left to its own devices, the WWP would have remained on the polit­i­cal mar­gin as a quirky Left sect whose weirdly mes­sianic ide­ol­ogy com­bined the worst aspects of Trot­sky­ism, Mao­ism, and Stal­in­ism into a unique and utterly foul brew.

That a bizarre out­fit like the WWP could become a seri­ous player in Amer­i­can left-wing rad­i­cal­ism in the year 2001 is above all a tes­ta­ment to the exist­ing ide­o­log­i­cal, intel­lec­tual, and moral bank­ruptcy of the broader Left, which still insists on liv­ing in a decrepit fan­tasy world where crim­i­nals are good, the police are evil, blacks are noble, whites are all racist, het­ero­sex­ual men are sex­ist, all women are vic­tims, Israel is always 100% wrong, the Pales­tini­ans are always 100% right, Amer­ica is „objec­tively“ reac­tionary, and America’s ene­mies are “objec­tively” pro­gres­sive and there­fore worth defend­ing. If this were not the case, the IAC never could or would have emerged as a seri­ous force.

There is no rea­son, at least in the­ory, why a new move­ment from the Left could not both sup­port a U.S.-led war against Islamist fanat­ics and fight to pre­serve civil lib­er­ties and social jus­tice, both at home and abroad. The entrenched knee-jerk anti-American mind­set of so many on the Left, how­ever, makes such a devel­op­ment highly unlikely. At the very least, how­ever, the ratio­nal ele­ments within the Left should be will­ing to crit­i­cally exam­ine the pro­pa­gan­dis­tic claims ema­nat­ing from a vari­ety of self-styled „human rights“ and „anti-war“ groups that are as polit­i­cally com­pro­mised and morally dubi­ous as the IAC, ANSWER, and the WWP. While the future role of the Left after 9/11 may not be clear, surely that much ought to be obvious.