WWP

Lou Paulsen wwchi at enteract.com
Mon Oct 8 19:54:12 PDT 2001


-----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>


>We've just been joined by Lou Paulsen, a Chicago-based member of
>Workers World. He's going to tell us what the party is all about.
>
>Doug

Hi all... well, I would make a rousing Leninist speech except that I just got in from an antiwar demonstration and I'm a bit worn out :-)

What can I say? We're Marxists. We're serious about it. We're about participating in every progressive movement against the established order of things. To coin a phrase. We take theory quite seriously and our whole tradition is against making concessions to the "public opinion" which the ruling class routinely creates.

On the other hand we're also serious about unity on the Left wherever possible particularly considering that all our respective tendencies are very weak and, really, inadequate to our historic tasks. So we take non-sectarianism very seriously also. And we don't believe in presenting bold theory to working people on the street in a way that makes people think that we are idiots. We believe (under present circumstances) in coalitions with non-restrictive points of unity that allow for the maximum range of participants, each of which of course is also free to advance its own line.

At the moment, of course, we're largely "about" participating in and building the current anti-war movement, however possible, wherever we are. We have strongly supported the movement to free Mumia; we worked hard to build the counter-inaugural protests in DC this last January; we supported the anti-globalization protests; and we try to educate the movement about Marxism. Of course we have comrades in the unions as well, and have also supported struggles of unorganized workers. We support every possible struggle against racism, sexism, police brutality, and all other forms of oppression and injustice. We came to the LGBT struggle early (as Leninists went), and our Bob McCubbin's book, "The Gay Question: a Marxist Analysis", written in, oh, 1974 or so, has guided our thinking since, as well as our Leslie Feinberg's later "Transgender Warriors".

Let's see, what else?

At the risk of sounding silly I would say that we take dialectics very seriously, even though I can't remember Sam Marcy ever having written a pamphlet on dialectics. But it's a tradition that we've learned in practice over the years and I think it comes naturally to us, although it would probably be good to address it specifically in our internal/external educational work, now that I think about it. Of course dialectics means ten things to ten Marxists, but what it means to me is that we can handle contradictory phenomena - like trade unions, other tendencies on the left, bourgeois nationalists, and so on - without thinking that we have to idealize or anathematize them. Doing either one is a trap.

Speaking of contradictory phenomena, since the subject of China came up, I will briefly say that our line is that capitalist -rule- has not been restored there, yet, despite the obvious flourishing of capitalist enterprises in China. If you tell us that there are obvious non-revolutionary aspects to the current Chinese leadership, I would reply that we've noticed them, but we think they're different from a counterrevolution. A counterrevolution is the kind of thing that happened in the USSR and Eastern Europe from 1989 to 1991: a historic disaster. For more on our line on China, Fred Goldstein has written some useful stuff - search www.workers.org for Goldstein and China. (By the way we have every article from our paper for the past 5 years on line, so it's not difficult to find out our position on things.)

In your e-mail, Doug, you asked about Stalin and Trotsky. Historically our party came out of the SWP, and our founders were very familiar with the tradition of Trotsky, the criticism of 'socialism in one country' and so on. On the other hand they left the SWP because they believed it was necessary in order to be able to come out in defense of socialism in the socialist camp, which Trotsky always favored, and not to confuse criticisms from the left with attacks from the right. And during the polemic between the USSR and China, up to 1968, we saw the Chinese criticisms of revisionism as being very progressive; and we supported the cultural revolution. So by 1972 or so nobody else on the left knew how to pigeonhole us :-)

Anyway, a "position" on Stalin - vs - Trotsky is not required from our members. It wasn't required when I joined in 1972, either, and we recruited a lot of good people who had considered themselves Stalinists and/or Maoists, as well as people who had been in various "Trotskyist" formations. In any case, I personally think that it's mostly quite possible to address the questions of socialism today without labeling oneself as a "Trotskyist", "Stalinist", "Maoist", etc. Furthermore, in the real world, my impression is that no two people who think that the Trotsky/Stalin dichotomy is important agree on what it means. Back in 1973 or so I had fun asking various self-identified Maoists what "Trotskyism" was, and they each said it was very bad but they all said different things. AND, when an issue of importance really comes up, like questions of line on the current war crisis for example, it turns out that there isn't much correlation between self-identification as "Trotskyist" or "Stalinist", on the one hand, and position on the issue, on the other. Not enough to make me lose sleep over it anyhow.

I hope this is a start? Anyway, thanks for letting me in, and now we'll see what else there is interest in, if anything :-)

Lou Paulsen member, Workers World Party Chicago



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