We have produced a sizable body of work, and I refer not only to written material. However, the people on this list who have declared themselves to be the enemies of WWP are not interested in 99% of it. Passing over our analysis of most of the struggling planet at most times, they concentrate on a small number of events which they believe are illustrative of our evil nature, and by clamoring about which they hope to expose our evil and inhuman characteristics.
In responding to the attacks on my tendency's position on Hungary in 1956, I can't help but remark on how unusual they are in objective terms. Although Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times declared, in a pre-September 29 smear, that WWP was formed specifically in order to support the USSR's intervention in Hungary, this was only a smear. To seize upon the events of Hungary in 1956 for an occasion to place WWP in the dock is to skip back over all the things that WWP has -done- in the half-century of its existence, and to choose, instead, to focus on an issue from before WWP's existence on which, in public terms, we did NOTHING AT ALL. There were no meetings, no public leaflets, no agitation in support of the intervention - there was nothing! There couldn't have been, because at that time we (meaning of course my party's founders - I myself was 4 years old at the time) were a minority within the SWP and had no influence on the SWP's actions on this issue. Thus, when we are talking about WWP's "position on Hungary in 1956", we are really talking about internal discussion materials which were seen at the time only by other members of the SWP, and whose only effect was to produce an analysis of the events and a critique of the SWP's own position, which was unrestrained opposition to the intervention. Furthermore, I think there are fewer than five people who are alive and active in WWP now who were active in the SWP then.
In fact, the only reason that the discussion of Copeland's position on Hungary in 1956 makes any sense at all in terms of a critique of WWP today is that WWP is in the unusual situation, for the US left, of having followed a very consistent general line from the date of its founding and even before, without major spasms, shifts, splits, purges, etc., so that the writings of Copeland in 1956 do indeed have something to do with the position of Paulsen today. There are not many parties of the US left that can boast of any comparable or comparably consistent tradition. It is not every party member who can read his/her political progenitors' old documents from 45 years before with no temptation to blush. Of course WWP's chief detractors here have no such tradition to defend. Imagine trying to take them to task for what someone wrote in 1956, or for that matter for what they themselves wrote in 1980.
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The "Hungary attack" on WWP depends on ignorance and misrepresentation. First, it depends on people's ignorance of what actually happened in Hungary in 1956. Second, it depends on a misrepresentation of the Marcy/Copeland tendency's response. [Talking about the Marcy-Copeland tendency is clumsy. I am going to use the inaccurate and anachronistic designation "WW" to refer to that tendency, but the reader should bear in mind that the first issue of Workers World was three years in the future, and that the members of the tendency were first and foremost members of the SWP and subject to its discipline, and, in fact, had no plans yet for organizing separately.]
Far from being the "Stalinists" that they are pictured to have been, Sam Marcy and Vince Copeland were working-class members of the leading US "Trotskyist" party, and would at that time readily have identified themselves as "Trotskyists". The orientation of the SWP-US was of course toward defense of the "workers' states" in the USSR and Eastern Europe against imperialism and capitalist reaction, and toward "political revolution" against the self-seeking "bureaucratic castes". All members of the SWP-US, including WW, were constantly on the lookout for a working-class upsurge against the undemocratic and repressive features of these regimes, which, they hoped, would result in true proletarian democracy in the revolutionary spirit of the early Bolsheviks.
In late October of 1956, a mass rebellion initiated by students and joined by the workers overthrew the government of Enro Gero and installed as prime minister the popular Imre Nagy, a lifelong communist who had previously been prime minister from 1953 to 1955. Nagy began to negotiate a withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. This upsurge was seen by the SWP-US majority as being precisely the kind of political revolution they had hoped for.
However, things moved very quickly after that. I am in fact going to quote from the "Encyclopedia Britannica" here, lest anyone should think that I am making things up:
"In kaleidoscopic political changes, Nagy resumed power but was driven from one concession to the next, until he found himself at the head of a genuine coalition government composed of Smallholders, Social Democrats, and National Peasants, which, with a "Catholic Association," had reconstituted themselves."
"The Soviet troops had withdrawn, and Nagy was negotiating for the complete evacuation of Hungary. On November 1 he announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact (to which it had adhered since 1955) and asked the United Nations to recognize Hungary as a neutral state, under the joint protection of the Great Powers."
This had all happened in less than a week. For WW, these were dismaying developments. Bear in mind that the United Nations had served as the vehicle for the US-led war in Korea. Bear in mind that these "Great Powers" were the occupying powers in western Germany, on the Hungarian border: the US, the UK, and France. The evidence was unmistakeable that Nagy was now the figurehead of a capitalist restorationist government. The "concessions" to which he had been "driven" were the work, not of workers' councils, but of the forces of renascent capital and of imperialist subversion. Despite the subjective intentions of the workers, what was actually happening was the overthrow of socialism and the return of Hungary to the imperialist camp. The "political revolution" had been hijacked and was being turned in the other direction.
It was very clear to the bourgeois media what was going on. The New York Times editorialized on November 1: "All signs point to a victory for freedom in Hungary ... the communist depotism there has at least been temporarily overthrown. That despotism can be restored only by Soviet troops."
The Herald Tribune: "If Nagy's pledges are fulfilled, it would mean the end of a Communist controlled Hungary, and the creation of a potentially hostile stronghold in the heart of Soviet Eastern Europe."
The Daily News, in an editorial entitled "Communism Clobbered", wrote: "world Communism has taken a disastrous defeat."
The completely reactionary Cardinal Mindszenty later declared, "It was obvious that the Nagy government was far better than the previous ones. Its policies were evolving." The 'evolution' was under the pressure of capitalist-restorationist and imperialist forces.
But in response to this, the USSR reintervened militarily and deposed the coalition government on November 4.
The response of the SWP-US majority was to completely condemn the USSR intervention and to publish articles in the "Militant" which helped to bring into existence a left mythology of the "Hungarian revolution of 1956" which survives to this day, according to which the workers' councils were leading the revolution and dictating its program. Tragically, this was not the case. Bourgeois restorationists, who were explicitly hopeful that the US would intervene militarily and occupy Hungary to protect it from the USSR, were leading the revolution, or counterrevolution rather. The workers in their councils were supporting this pro-imperialist counterrevolution and fighting for it. Some of them did so because they wanted to overthrow socialism. Others did so because they mistakenly believed that they could keep their socialism under conditions of bourgeois control of the government and US military occupation.
WW's response was to produce an internal document which was critical of the majority's analysis and the above-mentioned articles in the Militant, and to point out the actual restorationist character of the coalition government. This was absolutely not in the spirit of "cheering on the tanks". There was nothing to cheer about in these developments. But we did say that we favored Soviet intervention against the Nagy government which was calling for US military intervention and whose survival would inevitably mean the complete resurgence of capitalism in Hungary, not to mention the support it would lend to imperialism against the USSR and the rest of socialist Eastern Europe, and everywhere else in the world. It is tragic that, as a result of the previous years of bureaucratic misrule, any workers were so misled as to be willing to fight for such a horribly unworthy government.
"The American reporters," wrote Copeland, "were ... unanimous in their reports of the people's 'pathetic' belief that the U.S. would help them. ... [It] is well understood in Hungary that the U.S. is opposed to communism. ... The Hungarians .. would have to be developed Marxists at this point .. to understand the counter-revolutionary nature of United States world politics. Outside of the .. bureaucrats, nobody in Hungary condemned the United States (except for failure to intervene)."
To call this a 'Stalinist' position is to entirely misrepresent the basis of WW's position at the time. "The proletariat," wrote Copeland, "must bloc with the centrist bureaucracy against the rightist restoration as long as the bureaucracy is willing to fight. This is not a -moral- prescription, but a strategic necessity In Hungary under the circumstances and without a political party which has earned the masses' confidence it is well-nigh impossible. But whoever -knows- the truth must say so."
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Although the events in Hungary were not the cause for the foundation of WWP, I believe they must have had a great deal of impact on our eventual founding comrades' thinking, both about the difficult question of what actually to do about revisionism in the socialist camp and about the prospects for the SWP-US and its general line. In the absence of conscious Marxist leadership, the spontaneous rebellious activity of the Hungarian workers had only served as support for reaction and imperialism. "In a nationwide 'revolution' which overthrows the government of a workers state," wrote Copeland, "the working class must either take the full political power consciously with its own party, or go down to defeat under the class whose leadership -does- take the power."
Unfortunately, our views in 1956 were too little, too late, and too distant to have any effect on what actually happened in Hungary. If we could have had any effect, if we had been on the ground in Budapest and had been able to speak the language, we would not have chosen to "cheer on tanks." We would rather have gone among the workers to agitate for a clear position against capitalist restoration and imperialist intervention.
Today we are also in an uphill battle in the U.S. A majority of the U.S. working class is probably in support of the imperialist war against the people of Afghanistan and of the Arab and Muslim world. This does not make it a progressive war, however, and even if workers' councils and workers' demonstrations and even workers' direct action favored the war, it would still be a reactionary war of plunder. Alas, it is workers who volunteer to join the imperialist armed forces, and when bodies are brought back from Afghanistan, overwhelmingly they will be workers' bodies. Imperialism could do nothing anywhere if it were not for its ability to mislead workers into fighting their battles.
Lou Paulsen member, Workers World Party, Chicago