Re: Sol Dollinger again

[Apsken@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Sol wrote,

>  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.

The last sentence is false. The Johnsonites left the SWP with Shachtman in
1940 during the fight over the Russian Question. During the war, Johnsonites
led the UAW's Rank and File caucus, which mobilized against the No-Strike
Pledge, and edited the caucus publication. (See Marty Glaberman's book
Wartime Strikes.) After the war, when the Shachtmanites cast their lot in
auto with the Reuther group, the Johnson-Forest group negotiated the terms of
reentry to the SWP. Under the agreement, specific Johnson-Forest minority
positions were written and published during an interim period after leaving
the WP and before rejoining the SWP, after which time they would and did
strictly adhere to the SWP line publicly, and discipline in action. This
history is explained in The Balance Sheet of American Trotskyism by J.R.
Johnson (C.L.R. James). Internally, they did enjoy full minority rights and
representation, but they did not organize an opposition. When they left in
1953, they made no internal factional moves, because the decision was based
on differences over two things, the Americanization of Marxism (an issue on
which Cochran held similar views), and revolutionary organization (on which
Lou is hoping I'll stir a discussion, but not yet).

Ken Lawrence