Sol Dollinger again

[Apsken@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Sol Dollinger wrote,

>  C.L.R. James was not a great Trotskyist.  He retained his own political
>  group within the Schachtman party and also within the Socialist Workers
>  Party.  His state capitalist position was an obstacle to complete
>  integration in either organization.

    What petty sectarian crap! It was the Trotskyist movement and LDT himself
who boasted of James among their greatest leaders -- as the author of World
Revolution: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International, as the
translator of Boris Souvarine's biography of Stalin, as a touring public
speaker on the subject The Twilight of the British Empire, as leader of the
International African Service Bureau, as historian (The Black Jacobins) and
playright (Toussaint L'Ouverture, with Paul Robeson as the lead actor) of the
Sainte-Domingue revolution -- who brought prestige to the movement that no
one else could in the 1930s and 1940s. Trotsky regarded James's perspective
on Negro Liberation as superior to Cannon's. Both as a world spokesman for
the Fourth International, and as a sharecroppper organizer in Missouri, James
subordinated his own political line on the Soviet Union, and the
organizational interests of his faction, to the duties assigned by the
majority. As a consequence, the actual factional work was carried out by
others, mainly James Boggs, Grace Lee, Raya Dunayevskaya, Charles Denby,
Selma James, and Martin Glaberman. That remained so until after the
Johnson-Forest group had left the WP and the SWP. It is one thing for Sol to
uphold the achievements of the Cochran-Clarke group; quite another to demean
a leader whose impact on world revolutionary events, and whose continuing
importance to Marxists, has far surpassed those of Sol's faction.

Ken Lawrence