Socialists will have unprecedented access to a largely-forgotten but incredibly valuable body of literature, following the Marxist Internet Archive’s digitisation of the entire run of Labor Action.
Labor Action was the newspaper of the Workers Party (later the Independent Socialist League (ISL)), an American organisation which split from the Socialist Workers Party (no relation to the contemporary British group of the same name) in 1940 over what attitude to take to the Stalinist USSR. It also developed a more open attitude to questions of party organisation and internal democracy. In AWL’s view, the Workers Party/ISL represented the authentic continuation of the libertarian, revolutionary-democratic core of the Marxist project, almost entirely obliterated by a Stalinist counter-revolution whose effects twisted most of the Trotskyist movement to some degree into its own image.
Between 1940 and the late 1950s, the WP/ISL built up an enormous wealth of independent, anti-Stalinist, revolutionary socialist analysis on a whole range of questions, much of it contained in the pages of Labor Action, that has until now been hardly accessible.
The debates in the pages of Labor Action about the foundation of the state of Israel represent an immeasurably more sophisticated analysis of the situation than the common-sense of today’s left, based on vicarious Arab nationalism and an “anti-Zionism” so emptied of working-class socialist content as to tend towards anti-Semitism. The accounts of the Workers Party’s industrial organising during World War Two, contributions from neglected heroes of the tradition like Stan Weir, and much else, make this archive invaluable to anyone who wants to renew a libertarian, anti-Stalinist revolutionary tradition, organically linked to the Marxism of Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg.
Marty Goodman of the Riazanov project and David Walters of the MIA have done the socialist movement another huge service.
● Read the archive here
● More: here.