Worker's World Party

[Red October]

What do you all think of the Worker's World Party? Their youth section (FIST) is the most active communist group in my area, and I have worked with them for a few months now. All the people I know in the party are solid comrades and good people, but I don't know a whole lot about the party's platform. I was invited to their national conference last weekend, but couldn't get out of school to go. I've heard it mentioned here as being reformist and revisionist, but I haven't heard of any WWP party members or supporters here. By the way, I'm not a member of WWP or FIST, I've just worked with them before.

[black magick hustla]

lol ultraleftists and possibly some trots consider the WWP stalinist, while the most hardcore stalinists consider it revisionist.

The WWP are "trotskyists" but very unique in their line. They thought that thwarting the hungarian revolution was a good thing. Marcyte trotskyists very "enthusiastically" support degenerated or deformed workers states, more than traditional trots. They would never ever criticize them.

[Red October]

I've heard an anarchist say some of their members were Stalinists, but most others say they're a weird brand of Trotskyism.

[Random Precision]

They started out as a splinter group from the then-Trotskyist SWP over the issue of Soviet intervention in the Hungarian Revolution. Sam Marcy, its departed supreme lord and dictator, developed the bizarre and reactionary theory of "global class war" in which the struggle between the capitalist United States and the Stalinist USSR superseded the international struggle of the working class as well as proletarian revolution in each individual country. This was in turn derived out of the supposedly revolutionary role he saw Stalinist bureaucracies as acting out in China, Yugoslavia, et cetera. While he never would admit it, his theory had the effect of denying any sort of revolutionary role to the working class. So it would make a twisted sort of sense that he would support the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution by the Moscow bureaucrats, he saw socialism as something to be forced on, rather than enacted by, the workers.

His party may be seen as the embodiment of opportunism on the American Left. During the Marcy era WWP was marked by its slavish obedience to the AFL-CIO union bureaucracy as well as to the line of every Stalinist bureaucracy they could find. Today they still get all hot and wet for any leader or movement that proclaims itself to be acting in the interest of "national liberation", for example Robert Mugabe. Any repressive regime in the world that also happens to be generally anti-United States has a friend in the WWP, like the SLORC in Burma. WWP is well-known for its support for issues involving feminism and GLBT liberation although it tends to promote these goals as ends in themselves rather than part of the larger struggle for socialism. When WWP runs candidates for office in bourgeois elections (which it invariably will) it promotes its candidates as representatives of their particular community (feminist, gay, transgender) rather than advocates of socialism. During the eighties, it even had a run with supporting the so-called "left wing" of the Democratic Party, campaigning for Jesse Jackson's bid for the White House in 1984 as well as giving worshipful adoration (they still might) to each member of the Congressional Black Caucus. Another hobby of the WWP is forming "coalitions" which they have the only voice in (the other members being puppet organizations controlled by them). Unfortunately they lost their most recent one (A.N.S.W.E.R.) in the split with PSL, which while we're on the subject, everything that I said about the WWP goes for them as well. All in all, an organization with no ties to the working class, and one which is barren of any support for the cause of that class. An organization whose time has come to be swept into the dustbin of history.

One good thing I will say about them: they are most excellent at organizing rallies. They take on themselves the getting of demonstration permits, sound equipment, platforms, and get the word out like no one else. Unfortunately they also furnish the speakers at these events, when they have no concept of how many speakers is enough. This tends to scare off many of the people who might be interested in getting more involved. Nevertheless, it remains, as one comrade told me, that if the WWP didn't exist, we would have to invent it. :D

Ah, that really exhausted my reserve of sectarianism. Off to bed!

[Devrim]

Thanks for that information HLITP. I don't think I will be voting for them in the future. ;)


Originally posted by Red October
I've heard an anarchist say some of their members were Stalinists, but most others say they're a weird brand of Trotskyism.

Where do you draw the line between Trotskyism, and Stalinism though? The attitude of some of the Trotskyists to the defence of the Soviet Union was as hard line as many Stalinists. I remember seeing a copy of Workers Hammer with something like 'Hail Red Army' on the front when the Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan.

Devrim