[ahead to the question ot entry into the…]

Scan page 7

ahead to the question ot entry into the SP:

"Even though we had formed a new party, and had proclaimed it as the unification of the vanguard, we realised that we could not ignore ... this new movement, these new elements of strength and health and revolutionary vitality."

The Workers Party was too small to attract whole layers directly, so, in Trotsky's words:

"The Koran says that the mountain came to the prophet, Marxism counsels the prophet to go to the mountain."

Sectarians

in fighting for the tactical line of entrism Cannon and Schachtman had to contend with sectarian elements within the Workers Party itself.

With Trotsky's help, they successfully geared the party membership to an orientation into the organisations of the working class.

The simple alternatives posed by Trotsky in It is Time to Stop ring through Cannon's arguments. The choice was clear. Either the movement could go "forward to a wide arena of the Fourth International", , oI "backward to small circles stewing in their own juice". • The small circle within the Workers Party which rejected the idea of entrism formed around Oehler, Stamm and Zack.

Barrier

They were incapable of recognising that the growth of a left wing in the SP represented a real barrier to the development of the Workers Party.

Cannon and Schachtman were for getting inside the SP, exposing the treacherous fakery of the leadership of the left wing (who, much to Cannon's disgust called themselves the 'Militants'!) force to be reckoned with.

By October 1935 the Oehlerites were an isolated group, driven to breaches of party discipline by Cannon's vigorous campaign to educate his party on the political questions involved in the question of tactical entry into the Socialist They were duly expelled whilst the work of building the Workers Party went on, though with a watchful eye kept on developments within the SP.

In December 1935 the "seething cauldron" of the SP finally boiled over in a direct left-right split as the new generation of party activists clashed with the die-hard bureaucrats.

Cannon and Schachtman recognised the critical nature of the situation. As Cannon put it; the Workers Party must:

"seize the opportunity before it slipped away, take a step forward by effecting a fusion of the Trotskyist workers with the militant rank and file and young people in the SP who had at last the subjective desire to be revolutionists and who were moving in our direction".

Before the entry could be effected, however, there were two stages to be gone through.

Firstly another battle within the Workers Party, this time against Muste, the former leader of the American Workers Party.

Muste's objections to the 'French turn' in America were a product of organisational fetishism. He could not bear to see the party he had helped create liquidate itself in the SP.

Such a complete lack of any tactical awareness soon lost him support in the party which had become tempered in the fight so fabulous and fantastic.. They were ignorant, untalented, petty-minded, weak, cowardly, treacherous and vain".

Finally negotiations were concluded with the SP's leading figure, Norman Thomas, who had . just managed to oust the old guard right wing from the party leadership.

Thomas was a faker of the worst kind, a man of whom Trotsky somewhat charitably said, "He calls himself a socialist as the result of a misunderstanding."

Thomas was no political innocent, however. He exacted a high price for allowing the Trotskyists to enter the SP Give up The Workers Party had to give up its paper The Militant and its magazine New International.

They had to join as individuals rather than as an organisation, making appear that they were dissolving their party.

Cannon, however, correctly saw all this as a tactical question, not a matter of wooden principle _"we had been too long in the Lenin school for that".

At the final conferene of the Workers Party in March 1936 the decision to enter the SP was formally ratified.

Critical moment

The most important step towards building a revolutionary party in the US had been taken, and taken, in Cannon's estimation, at a critical moment when the already disintegrating SP stood to lose its best workers and youth either to syndicalism' or to the Communist Party.

These workers and youth were the layers the Trotskyists aimed at in a year-long campaign carried out with boundless energy and commitment.

This was the year 1936.

Gene On each of these issues with the exception of the Labor Party question, the US Trotskyists were able to make important gains.

The Trotsky Defence Committee, assembled through contacts from around the SP, dealt a major blow at the Stalinists, who were themselves hoping to recruit from the SP leftwing.

Exposed

On the Spanish question the "Cannonites" were able to expose the bankruptcy of the SP leaders' support for the loyalist government of Spanish 'left' Socialist Largo Caballero. ral Motors was unionised in the i June and July 1937.

The 15 month entry into the SP saw the Trotskyist grouping grow from a couple of hundred to well over one thousand members.

Mistakes were made, certain comrades had overadapted to centrist elements within the SP and certain opportunities for mass work had been missed, but important gains had also been made.

Sections of politically conscious workers and youth (virtually the entire SP youth in fact) were expelled and won to Trotskyism.

Moreover, the SP itself had been removed for all wave of sit-down militancy. for the international working class, its cadres still undergoing the continuous tempering in theoretical and practical struggle that is necessary for the development of a principled revolutionary vanguard That tempering process was to continue with a further internal fight, this time over the nature of the Russian state.

This will be the subject of the concluding article in this series.

CONCLUDED

NEXT

Scan page 8

Pa. SOCIA •PF LIS CD. 019;