By David McReynolds
2009 May 24
Comrades,
This goes both to the SP-members list and to some personal contacts of mine. If those contacts are getting two copies and want NOT to get any mail directly from me, please let me know.
There has been a discussion - which, if permitted, can become endless - on what is Leninism, what is Trotskyism, etc.
The real issue if what should American socialists do now, here. American socialists are understandably fascinated by events in Russia in 1917 and in many cases repelled by the excesses of that revolution.
But what about our country? I am fascinated that the Debs Tendency in the SP seems to be largely (or heavily) Leninist, yet Debs, while not a theoretical writer, was emphatically not a Leninist (or Trotskyist). What is most important about Debs was that he appears on the scene before the events of October 1917.
If we go back much earlier, we should never underestimate the importance of the American
Revolution which, for all its limits, (how like the events of October 1917 in that respect!) it was the first break in the West with the divine right of Kings, the abolition of the right of the aristocracy to rule.
If we leap ahead to 1955 and the Civil Rights Revolution in Montgomery, which laid the basis for so much else - the struggle against nuclear tests and the arms race, the end of the disease of McCarthyism, the student free speech movement, etc. - it owed its greatest debt not to Lenin or Trotsky, but to Mohandas Gandhi. (As Gandhi owed a debt to Tolstoy who in turn owed a debt to Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience).
I almost literally beg us to look to our own country. Debs provided a real start. The late A.J. Muste tried with the American Workers Party (google for that). Bert Cochran broke with the Trotskyists to set up the American Socialist in an effort to do this. Liberation magazine of the period from 1956 to 1970 or so was a radical pacifist effort to do the same thing.
Why, why, why do we let ourselves be drawn back to events in another culture, another time, another place?
Our work is here. Our movement today probably owes more to Martin Luther King and Malcom X and Mohandas Gandhi than it does to Leon Trotsky. (May he rest in peace).
Fraternally,