On Sam Marcy and 1948 Wallace Campaign

(Letter)

Bay Area
12 August 2008

Dear comrades,

I appreciated Workers Vanguard’s spread, “On Bourgeois ‘Third Parties’ and the 1948 Henry Wallace Campaign” (WV No. 918, 1 August). This is particularly timely, as the intro to the 1966 Spartacist article on the Wallace campaign points out, because of the numerous parallels between Wallace and the Greens’ Cynthia McKinney. The article notes that the Workers World Party (WWP) has endorsed McKinney, but the roots of that tendency and its class-collaborationist opportunism actually date back to the Wallace campaign. The forerunner to WWP began in 1948 as a minority within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Led by Sam Marcy among others, it advocated support to Wallace’s capitalist Progressive Party. The 1948 fight with the Marcyites presaged the SWP’s belated 1953 fight against Pabloite revisionism and its American variant, the Cochran-Clarke faction.

As the intro to the Spartacist reprint notes, in sorting out the various “independent” candidacies in the 1966 midterm elections, we “relied on the working-class Marxist analysis developed in part by James P. Cannon” who led the fight against the Marcyites in 1948. Cannon, in turn, acknowledged his debt to the Bolsheviks and Leon Trotsky’s 1928 criticism of the draft Comintern program and its scathing critique of Stalin’s promotion of so-called two-class parties like the Guomindang and the American Farmer-Labor Party. As Cannon stated in his summary speech on election policy at the February 1948 SWP plenum:

“The maneuvers of the Bolsheviks were always within class lines. I don’t know of any effort made by the Bolsheviks to maneuver within the parties of the bourgeoisie. On the contrary their whole tactical line, maneuverist as it was, was to make a sharp cleavage between the working class organizations and those of the bourgeoisie. What was the meaning of the great slogan, ‘All Power to the Soviets’? What was the meaning of the slogan, ‘Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers’? Or later, Trotsky’s slogan for France: ‘A Blum-Cachin Government!’ And still later the slogan: ‘A CP-SP-CGT Government!’ They were all class slogans designed to split the workers’ parties entirely away from all collaboration with bourgeois politicians.”

—Education for Socialists (March 1971)

Best comradely regards,
Reuben Samuels