The Prophet's Children: Travels on the American Left
By Tim Wohlforth
Humanities Press, 1994. 330 pp., $26.
Review by Adam Hanieh
Tim Wohlforth was a key figure in the US Trotskyist movement from the McCarthy years until the '70s. This highly personal and very readable account of his political life is a fascinating journey through mass movements, ultraleft sects and party building in the belly of US imperialism. It will primarily interest activists familiar with many of the people that Wohlforth mentions.
Wohlforth joined the Independent Socialist League in the mid-1950s in response to a campus tour by one of the ISL leaders. The ISL was led by Max Shachtman, a former leader of the US Socialist Workers Party(SWP), the main Trotskyist organisation in the US.
Shachtman, who had split from the SWP at the beginning of World War II, formulated a theory that the bureaucracy in the USSR had become a new class.
Most Shachtmanites ended up in the Democratic Party; today they play a role in groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America.
Wohlforth was eventually won over to the position of the SWP on the USSR: that despite the Stalinist bureaucracy, the USSR preserved the property forms of created by the 1917 revolution. What was required was a political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy and establish a genuine workers democracy.
Wohlforth joined the SWP and helped to revive and lead its defunct youth organisation, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) in 1959. Wohlforth's description of his time in the SWP during the late '50s and early '60s is a fascinating although distorted picture of the party.
Dispute over Cuba
He characterises it as highly factionalised, not very active and with a low level of political discussion. He also claims that many party leaders were dismissive of the youth organisation. However, this more probably reflects Wohlforth's attempt to use the YSA against the party majority during the struggle over the SWP's position on the Cuban Revolution.
In this section of the book, Wohlforth glosses over some of his actions at the time. Wohlforth was in an unprincipled bloc with James Robertson, who later founded the Spartacist League.
Both opposed the party's support for the Castro leadership, but they had significant differences between themselves, which they tried to paper over. Robertson regarded Castro as a Stalinist and Cuba as comparable to the bureaucratic regimes of eastern Europe. Wohlforth's position was that there had not been a social revolution in Cuba: Castro was merely "another Batista".
Wohlforth's departure from the SWP in 1964 marked the start of a journey into the world of ultraleft sectarianism. He left with nine comrades and strengthened his links with the British Trotskyists of the Socialist Labour League and their leader Gerry Healy.
Healy cult
Wohlforth's story about his time associated with Healy makes absorbing, although horrifying, reading.
The SLL at that time was one of the largest groups on the British far left, controlling the youth group of the Labour Party and having a large implantation in the working class.
Healy dominated this group, and over the years his political positions degenerated into bizarre caricatures of Marxism. (Years later, Healy was expelled by the group he had led after his repeated sexual harassment of female comrades came to light. The SLL split into numerous small sects.)
In the '60s, Wohlforth led the Healyite group in the US, the Workers League. The central political issue of much of the period was the Vietnam War, and Wohlforth's descriptions of the movement against the war reveal that much of his ultraleftism remains.
Wohlforth admits that the SWP and YSA were the key organisations in the antiwar movement, but he disagrees with their orientation. The SWP/YSA argued consistently for the largest possible demonstrations around the slogan "Out Now!", and helped to bring about some of the largest anti-imperialist protests in history. The US ruling class today still worries about whether it has overcome the "Vietnam syndrome".
Wohlforth and the Workers League argued for lobbying the trade union leaders to mobilise "workers' rallies" and for confrontational campus-based actions.
Degeneration of SWP
Wohlforth's final chapters detail his falling out with Healy and his rejoining of the SWP in 1975. Towards the end of the '70s, the SWP made its "turn to industry", an attempt to have all members working in basic industry in expectation of big upsurges in working-class struggles.
Wohlforth says that the turn made him feel at home in the SWP, but soon the SWP leadership elevated this tactical decision into an all-time strategic approach.
Despite the renewal of struggles outside the labour movement (particularly the Central American solidarity movement), the SWP required its members to "deepen the turn" and began to take an ultraleft approach to these movements. Expulsion of members who disagreed with this approach began, and the SWP degenerated into a sect around the figure of national secretary Jack Barnes.
Wohlforth left the SWP and travelled to Mexico. He visited Cuba and wrote for left-wing journals such as Against the Current.
Wohlforth's conclusions about his time as a revolutionary socialist are tainted by his experiences in sectarian ultraleft organisations. He now believes that the problem is Leninism, and he advocates a return to the all-inclusive pre-World War I Socialist Party of Eugene Debs.
His arguments are all too familiar: Leninism leads to Stalinism, Leninism is undemocratic, Leninist parties automatically degenerate into sects, Lenin substituted the party for the masses, we live in a "post-vanguardist" era.
But Wohlforth's experiences of Leninism were caricatures of Lenin's real approach. Lenin started from the understanding that a revolution would not triumph accidentally, but needed a conscious, planned leadership in the face of the most organised and powerful ruling class in history.
He argued that the party should be characterised by the freest possible discussion when making a decision and unity in action once the decision was made. The only way to see if a decision is correct is to test it in practice, and you can do that only with complete unity.
The Bolshevik party was the complete opposite of the parties that Wohlforth knew. Lenin was often in the minority and outvoted by other party leaders. Different opinions did exist in the leadership, even right up to the question of whether there should be a revolution in October 1917.
Compare this with the SLL, where all decisions were made by Gerry Healy, who was never wrong and who expelled people for having disagreements over abstract philosophical points!
Wohlforth praises the dedication and heroism of many involved in the far left who have taken on the difficult task of building revolutionary parties in advanced capitalist countries. However, if that heroism is not to be in vain, it needs a rewinning of the Leninism that Wohlforth rejects but never experienced.