For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

(Quote of the Week)

In 1948 Henry Wallace’s “third party” presidential candidacy was discussed in the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), with some elements wanting to support his bourgeois Progressive Party campaign. SWP leader James P. Cannon’s report laid out the fundamental Marxist criteria for assessing the class character of a party, criteria we uphold today in opposing the capitalist “third party” Greens and their left-liberal presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, who is hailed by reformist leftists.

The Wallace party must be opposed and denounced by every class criterion. In the first place it is programmatically completely bourgeois, as all the comrades have recognized. Its differences with the Republican and Democratic parties are purely tactical. There is not a trace of a principled difference anywhere. And by principled difference I mean a class difference....

It would be very, very bad and demoralizing if we would allow for a moment the anti-war demagogy of Wallace to be taken by any member of our party as something preferable to the blatant aggressiveness of Truman and Marshall. That would be nothing less than the preparation of the minds of party members for “lesser evil” politics—based on the theory that one kind of capitalist tactics in the expansion of American imperialism is preferable to another, and that the workers should intervene to support one against the other....

The class character of the party is determined first by its program; secondly by its actual policy in practice; and thirdly by its composition and control. The Wallace party is bourgeois on all these counts; by its program, its policy and practice, its composition and control....

Wallace is the, as yet, unacknowledged, candidate for the role of diverting the workers’ movement for independent political action into the channel of bourgeois politics dressed up with radical demagogy which costs nothing. That is what we have to say, and that’s what we have to fight—vigorously and openly, and with no qualifications at all. We have to be 100% anti-Wallaceites. We have to stir up the workers against this imposter, and explain to them that they will never get a party of their own by accepting substitutes.

—James P. Cannon, “Election Policy in 1948” (February 1948)