A free encyclopedia with a missing chapter
Anyone seriously interested in the history of socialism,
communism, and political radicalism in the United States should welcome the
appearance of a freely accessible digital edition of the Encyclopedia of the
American Left. The project has an unusually long history. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul
Buhle and Dan Georgakas began work on it in 1987. Garland published the first
edition in 1990, followed by a substantially expanded Oxford University Press
edition in 1998. Verso's current edition, supported by the Rosa Luxemburg
Foundation and a grant from the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, is
freely available online, and its publishers describe it as about three times
larger than the initial version. Its stated objective is to provide information
for "the growing socialist movement in the United States and
globally". [versobooks.com]
That ambition makes a striking omission considerably more
important than it might at first appear. One of the longest-established
tendencies within American Trotskyism, represented successively by the American
Committee for the Fourth International, the Workers League and the Socialist
Equality Party, is effectively absent as an organisation having its own history
and political standpoint. The same applies to its principal contemporary
publication, the World Socialist Web Site.
This is not merely a question of whether a small political
organisation deserves another entry in an already enormous reference work. The
omission removes one side of a fundamental dispute concerning the history of
the Fourth International after the Second World War. Whatever judgement one
makes about the International Committee of the Fourth International, Gerry
Healy, Tim Wohlforth, David North, the Workers League or the SEP, their history
belongs to the history of American Trotskyism. An encyclopedia need not endorse
their interpretation. It does, however, have to acknowledge that the
interpretation exists.
The problem of historical visibility
Reference works inevitably establish hierarchies of
historical importance. Inclusion does not necessarily mean political
endorsement, and omission does not automatically prove deliberate suppression.
Nevertheless, encyclopedias help determine which organisations, controversies
and individuals subsequent readers regard as historically significant.
That makes omissions particularly important when an excluded
organisation participated directly in events described elsewhere in the work. The
International Committee's history cannot be separated from the Socialist
Workers Party's history. Its American origins emerged from disputes within the
SWP itself. Tim Wohlforth's 1971 The Struggle for Marxism in the United
States, for example, explicitly described the Workers League as having been
"born in a struggle within the Socialist Workers Party against revisionism
in the 1960s". His book presented that conflict as inseparable from an
international struggle involving the British Socialist Labour League and other
forces within the International Committee. [marxists.org]
One can reject Tim Wohlforth's interpretation, as he himself
ultimately did. But one cannot reconstruct the conflicts within American
Trotskyism during the 1960s while making one of the organisations produced by
those conflicts conceptually disappear. That is the central weakness here. The
absence does not simply remove names. It simplifies a political conflict.
1953 and the meaning of Pabloism
The decisive historical background is the crisis of the
Fourth International associated with Michel Pablo and the 1953 split. The
International Committee interpretation insists that this was not essentially a
personal or organisational disagreement. It regarded Pabloism as a fundamental
political revision of Trotskyism concerning the role of Stalinism, bourgeois
nationalism and the necessity for independent revolutionary parties of the
working class. From this standpoint, the International Committee sought to
preserve the Fourth International's programme and organisational independence.
This interpretation remained fundamental to the later
Workers League. In his 1971 history, Tim Wohlforth explicitly traced the American
tendency's development through its struggle against what it saw as the SWP's
abandonment of revolutionary Marxism. This matters because treating the
eventual 1963 reunification as proof that the earlier division had been
overcome implicitly adopts the United Secretariat's interpretation of the
dispute. For the International Committee, 1963 meant the opposite:
reunification marked the SWP's political capitulation to positions it had
opposed ten years earlier.
A neutral reference work does not have to decide between
these competing interpretations. It could say: the United Secretariat regarded
reunification as overcoming the earlier division; the International Committee
rejected the reunification and argued that the first political disagreement
remained unresolved. That modest historiographical distinction would
immediately make the history considerably more intelligible.
The forgotten opposition inside the SWP
The American consequences of the international dispute emerged
within the SWP in the early 1960s. Tim Wohlforth, who had entered the SWP after
earlier involvement in the Shachtmanite movement, aligned himself with the
International Committee. Another opposition figure associated with James
Robertson followed a different trajectory. The International Committee's own
retrospective history states that it expelled James Robertson from the SWP in
December 1963, and suspended and expelled Tim Wohlforth and eight supporters
after they issued a letter to the SWP membership on 30 June 1964. It states
that the American Committee for the Fourth International formed in the summer
of 1964 and that the Workers League was established in November 1966.
This is
the International Committee's account and should be identified as such, but it
lays out an organisational chronology that any fuller treatment of American
Trotskyism would need to confront. This
history matters because two enduring tendencies emerged from struggles
connected to the SWP crisis: the tendency that developed into the Spartacist
League and the tendency that developed into the Workers League. They
subsequently became bitter adversaries. That does not make either irrelevant.
On the contrary, their conflict forms part of the extraordinarily fragmented
history of post-war American Trotskyism.
A reference work that discusses numerous small organisations
should pay particular attention to these divisions, because Trotskyist history
cannot be understood merely through membership totals. Its history is
overwhelmingly a history of political controversies, theoretical disagreements,
international alignments, splits, reunifications and competing claims to
revolutionary continuity.
The Workers League
The establishment of the Workers League in 1966 supplied the
International Committee with an American organisation that survived the
enormous political transformations of the following decades. Its early
development was difficult and frequently turbulent. The organisation recruited
among radicalising young people during the Vietnam War era but subsequently
argued that it needed a much deeper orientation towards the American working
class. The International Committee's later history acknowledges a severe
internal crisis during 1973–74, noting that the Workers League lost more than
half its membership in about a year. [wsws.org]
This matters since it undermines any temptation to present
the history hagiographically. The Workers League was neither a mass party nor a
movement proceeding easily from success to success. At various points it was
small, politically isolated and internally troubled. But smallness is not
itself a convincing criterion for exclusion from the history of the
revolutionary left. Indeed, much of the history of American Marxism consists of
relatively small organisations. If numerical strength became the principal
criterion of significance, enormous parts of American Trotskyism and
revolutionary socialism would become incomprehensible. The better question is
whether an organisation generated political arguments, publications and
organisational descendants significant enough to form part of the historical
record. By that standard the Workers League plainly qualifies.
The Wohlforth crisis
Tim Wohlforth's career also makes the absence particularly
conspicuous. His importance stems not only from his position as an early leader
of the Workers League but from the extraordinary trajectory of his political
development. He was initially one of the International Committee's most
energetic defenders in the United States. His book, The Struggle for Marxism
in the United States, attempted to reinterpret the history of American
Trotskyism through the relationship between revolutionary Marxism and what he saw
as the recurring pressures of American pragmatism, radicalism, and opportunism.
The rupture occurred in 1974. According to the SEP's later
account, the Workers League leadership discovered that Nancy Fields, Tim
Wohlforth's partner who had been elevated into leadership responsibilities, had
close family connections with senior CIA personnel and that these connections
had not previously been disclosed to the organisation. The Workers League
removed Tim Wohlforth as national secretary and suspended Nancy Fields pending
an investigation. Tim Wohlforth subsequently resigned and later returned to the
SWP. These are claims from the SEP's own retrospective account and should be
presented as such rather than converted into an independent historical verdict.
Precisely because the episode became so bitterly contested,
it deserves historical treatment rather than disappearance. The International
Committee interpreted Tim Wohlforth's departure as a turning point. Its
retrospective history states explicitly that the organisation responded to the
crisis by undertaking an extensive reconsideration of the history of the Fourth
International and making the assimilation of that history increasingly central
to cadre education. Tim Wohlforth, meanwhile, moved sharply away from that
interpretation and eventually became a critic of his former organisation and of
the tradition with which he had formerly identified. Here an encyclopedia could
perform an especially useful function: present the rival accounts, identify the
documentary evidence, and allow readers to investigate for themselves.
Security and the Fourth International
The next omission is still more consequential because it
involves one of the most controversial episodes in post-war Trotskyist history:
Security and the Fourth International. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the
International Committee investigated the circumstances surrounding the
assassination of Leon Trotsky, questions involving infiltration of the
Trotskyist movement, and allegations concerning individuals associated with the
SWP.
The arguments arising from this investigation became
extraordinarily bitter. The International Committee regarded its investigation
as a major defence of the Trotskyist movement's security and historical
persistence. Its opponents accused it of making unjustified allegations and
turned the investigation itself into evidence of what they regarded as the
political degeneration of the Healy leadership.
The point here is not that an encyclopedia must endorse the
International Committee's conclusions. Quite the reverse. This is exactly where
encyclopedic neutrality becomes important. A proper article could explain what Security
and the Fourth International was, identify its principal claims, summarise
the evidence its authors presented, and then describe the objections raised
against it. Erasing the controversy does not resolve it. It merely deprives
readers of the opportunity to understand why it produced such violent conflict.
That principle applies equally to the crisis that engulfed
the British Workers Revolutionary Party in 1985. For outsiders, the history of
the International Committee is often collapsed into Gerry Healy's history.
Consequently, the downfall of Gerry Healy is treated as though it automatically
disposed of the political tendency associated with him.
But historians dispute that. The Workers League under David
North became part of the struggle against the WRP leadership's political line.
The factional crisis eventually produced a permanent rupture. The organisations
remaining within the International Committee later argued that the crisis
showed the consequences of the WRP leadership's abandonment of the political
and theoretical principles the ICFI had historically defended. Others regarded
that explanation as an attempt by former collaborators to distance themselves
retrospectively from Gerry Healy.
Again, competing accounts shape history. An encyclopedia's
responsibility is not to suppress one interpretation because another appears
more persuasive. It is to establish what occurred, identify the competing
political explanations and provide readers with enough bibliography to
investigate the dispute.
From Workers League to Socialist Equality Party
The post-1985 history makes complete omission harder to
explain as simple historical housekeeping. The Workers League did not disappear
with the crisis of the British organisation. It continued operating in the
United States and eventually became the Socialist Equality Party. This
represented more than a name change in the tendency's own conception: it was tied
to a reassessment of the relationship between revolutionary organisations and
the working class following the long decline of the old labour and Stalinist
organisations.
Whatever one thinks of that assessment, it produced an
organisation that continued the political lineage extending from the 1960s. The
further establishment of the World Socialist Web Site expanded the tendency's
publishing operation dramatically and made its political material
internationally accessible. Consequently, the question is no longer simply why
a small 1960s Trotskyist organisation is missing from an encyclopedia. It is
why an organisation with a history extending across successive political forms
and a substantial online publishing presence receives no independent historical
treatment.
How does such an omission happen? The explanation need not
involve a conspiracy. The Encyclopedia emerged from a particular
intellectual and political milieu. Its editors were centrally associated with
the recovery and reinterpretation of American radical history that developed
around the New Left. The digital project's own account describes a continuing
expansion involving academics and activists and presents the project as an
effort to recover neglected histories of American radicalism. Every
historiographical tradition contains its own field of vision.
The New Left rediscovered organisations, movements and
activists marginalised by conventional political history. That was an enormous
achievement. But sections of that intellectual milieu also developed
interpretations of Marxism and socialism sharply different from traditions
stressing the Bolshevik party, Trotskyism and the historical succession of the
Fourth International. The contemporary institutional circumstances are relevant
too, though they should not be treated as proof of editorial interference.
Verso explicitly states that the online edition received support from the Rosa
Luxemburg Foundation and a grant from the Democratic Socialists of America
Fund.
That is a fact. It does not establish that either
organisation ordered the exclusion of the SEP or the International Committee. No
evidence is presented here for such a claim. The more plausible argument
concerns the intellectual environment within which political importance is
recognised. Historiographical blind spots usually operate more subtly than
censorship. Some organisations appear self-evidently significant. Others
gradually disappear from the narrative because the historians constructing that
narrative do not regard their controversies as especially important.
Two incompatible histories of Trotskyism
The deeper question, therefore, involves the historiography
of Trotskyism itself. Two fundamentally different narratives emerged from the
crisis of the Fourth International. From the standpoint broadly associated with
the United Secretariat, the 1953 division was ultimately superseded by
reunification in 1963. Subsequent anti-Pabloite tendencies therefore appear as
increasingly sectarian survivals of an argument that history had largely
overtaken.
The International Committee tells the opposite story. For
it, 1953 identified a fundamental revisionist tendency within the Fourth
International; 1963 did not solve the problem but deepened it; and the ICFI's
later history represented the continuing struggle to preserve Trotskyist
political continuity against adaptation to Stalinism, bourgeois nationalism,
and middle-class radicalism.
Tim Wohlforth's 1971 book provides unusually clear
contemporary evidence of that self-conception. It says directly that the
Workers League emerged from an international fight against revisionism within
the SWP and examines the history of Marxism in the United States as inseparable
from international conflicts within the Trotskyist movement. Readers need not
accept this interpretation. But historians cannot simply write as though it
never existed.
There is nevertheless a serious counterargument. Encyclopedias
cannot include everything. Revolutionary politics in the United States
generated hundreds of groups, factions, committees, newspapers and ephemeral
organisations. Editorial judgements must be made. The Workers League remained
relatively small, suffered significant internal crises, and never became a mass
political party. Moreover, some relevant entries could inherit structures and
assumptions from earlier editions compiled decades before the SEP and WSWS's
contemporary digital presence became significant. The present Verso edition
describes itself as an expansion of a pre-existing work, not a completely new
encyclopedia constructed from scratch.
Those factors could explain some of the gaps without
attributing political motives to the editors. But they do not finally resolve
the problem. Once an encyclopedia claims wide coverage of the American left, size
alone cannot be a sufficient criterion. Many historically important radical
organisations were tiny. Their significance derived from the ideas they
expressed, the disputes in which they participated, the people they influenced,
or the organisations they subsequently gave rise to. Marxist history would
become extraordinarily thin if historians included only successful mass
organisations.
The irony is that the problem would not be difficult to
correct. The digital format makes supplementation far easier than it would have
been when the original print volumes appeared. A concise entry headed Workers
League/Socialist Equality Party could establish the essential chronology
without accepting the organisation's political conclusions. It could explain
the International Committee's origins in the 1953 split. It could outline the
opposition that developed inside the SWP during the early 1960s, the
establishment of the American Committee for the Fourth International and the
Workers League, the 1974 Tim Wohlforth crisis, the controversy surrounding Security
and the Fourth International, the 1985–86 international split, and the
later emergence of the Socialist Equality Party and World Socialist Web Site.
It should also present substantial criticism. Tim
Wohlforth's later repudiation of his previous politics belongs in the record.
So do the criticisms made of the ICFI by rival Trotskyist traditions and former
members. The disputes surrounding Gerry Healy, the WRP crisis and Security
and the Fourth International should not be sanitised. But neither should
the organisation's answers to those criticisms be omitted. That is what
historical balance means. It does not mean finding an imaginary position midway
between incompatible political arguments. It means accurately representing those
arguments' existence and content.
The absence consequently tells us something about how the
history of the American left is constructed. Historical canons do not arise
automatically. Someone decides which organisations receive entries, which
disputes deserve explanation, which books constitute "further
reading", and which political traditions become essential to the
narrative. Those judgements can reproduce assumptions without anyone
consciously suppressing anything.
The history of the revolutionary left is especially
vulnerable because it is composed of defeated movements, minority factions and
arguments whose significance was frequently understood only retrospectively. A
faction containing a handful of people can sometimes raise questions that later
prove more historically revealing than organisations hundreds of times its
size.
The fragmentation of American Trotskyism is itself
historical evidence about the enormous political pressures confronting
revolutionaries in the twentieth century: Stalinism, anti-communism, the Cold
War, the trade-union bureaucracy, the Vietnam War, the New Left, identity
politics, the decline of traditional labour organisations and the repeated
debates over nationalism and the Democratic Party. The Workers League and its
successors developed distinctive answers to all these questions. Those answers
may be attacked, rejected or defended. But they existed, and they generated a
political tradition extending across decades.
An encyclopedia should open arguments, not close them.
The issue here is larger than the fortunes of any single
organisation. A socialist encyclopedia should encourage readers to investigate
political controversies rather than settle them silently through inclusion and
exclusion. The Encyclopedia of the American Left deserves considerable
credit for being made freely available. Its publishers explicitly hope that the
work will assist a growing socialist movement internationally. That is
precisely why its omissions deserve scrutiny rather than being ignored.
The International Committee's interpretation of post-war
Trotskyism may be right or wrong. Tim Wohlforth's early interpretation contrasts
with his later repudiation of it. The extraordinary disputes surrounding Gerry
Healy, David North, the SWP, the International Committee, Security, and the
Fourth International can be examined from several sides. But none of that
history becomes less important because it is controversial—quite the opposite.
Disputes over Pabloism, the 1963 reunification, party
security, the relationship between Trotskyism and the New Left, and the
international crisis of 1985 raise fundamental questions about what
revolutionary socialism was supposed to be. They belong within any serious
political history of the American left. A digital encyclopedia has one
overwhelming advantage over its printed predecessors: omissions need not remain
permanent. The solution therefore is not to demand an entry that endorses the
Socialist Equality Party's account of itself. It is to demand something much
simpler and historically more defensible: an entry acknowledging that this
history exists, explaining why its participants fought so bitterly over it, and
allowing readers to judge the evidence for themselves.
Until it does, the Encyclopedia of the American Left
contains an important absence. And because that absence concerns one of the
principal disputes over the historical continuity of American Trotskyism after
1953, it is not merely a missing entry. It is a missing argument.
Bibliography
The Encyclopedia of the American Left
Buhle, Mari Jo, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds. Encyclopedia
of the American Left. New York: Garland, 1990.
Buhle, Mari Jo, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds. Encyclopedia
of the American Left. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Verso Books. About the Encyclopedia. The publisher
states that work began in 1987, that the first and second editions appeared in
1990 and 1998, and that the current digital edition received support from the
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and DSA Fund. [versobooks.com]
American Trotskyism and the Workers League
Cannon, James P. The History of American Trotskyism:
Report of a Participant. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1944.
Breitman, George. The Last Year of Malcolm X: The
Evolution of a Revolutionary. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1967.
Wohlforth, Tim. The Struggle for Marxism in the United
States: A History of American Trotskyism. New York: Labour Publications,
1971. The online edition identifies the book as first published in 1971 and
records Tim Wohlforth's contemporary interpretation of the Workers League's
origins. [marxists.org]
International Committee sources
International Committee of the Fourth International. Trotskyism
versus Revisionism. 7 vols. London: New Park Publications.
North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to
the History of the Fourth International. Detroit: Labour Publications,
1988.
North, David and Alex Steiner. The Fourth International
and the Renegade Wohlforth: The Struggle for Trotskyism in the United States.
Labour Publications, 1984. The digitised volume includes contemporary and
retrospective documentation on the conflicts involving Tim Wohlforth, the SWP,
and the Workers League. [marxists.org]
Socialist Equality Party (US). The Historical and
International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (United States).
The sections on the 1974 crisis give the SEP's account of Tim Wohlforth's
removal and departure and state that the Workers League lost more than half its
membership in 1973–74. [wsws.org]
Socialist Equality Party (US). The Workers League After
Wohlforth. This section sets out the SEP's contention that the 1974 break
initiated a larger re-examination of the history of the Fourth International. [wsws.org]
Wider historiography
Alexander, Robert J. International Trotskyism, 1929–1985:
A Documented Analysis of the Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1991.
Le Blanc, Paul. Trotskyism in the United States:
Historical Essays and Reconsiderations. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.
Wald, Alan M. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and
Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
Wohlforth, Tim and Dennis Tourish. On the Edge: Political
Cults Right and Left. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000.
