Re: Sol Dollinger again

["Sol Dollinger" <soldoll@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Our Johnsonite friend is very prickly about his ideological leader.  Johnson
thought of himself as a Marxist and the Johnsonites held independent
positions in the  1939 Socialist Workers Party, left in 1940 with Schachtman
and Burnham after a brief sojourn, returned to the SWP and eventually left
again.  Johnson was a great writer, a magnificent speaker, a stalwart
defender of Marxism, as he interpreted his writings, but never a great
Trotskyist leader.  His shifts from group to group was an independent effort
to build his tendency within the Trotskyist movement.
-----Original Message-----
From: Apsken@xxxxxxx <Apsken@xxxxxxx>
To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sunday, April 30, 2000 3:20 PM
Subject: Sol Dollinger again


>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
>