The global class war comes to Prague

The Workers' World Party (WWP) is something as strange and oxymoronic as pro-Stalinist Trotskyists, or even pro-Stalin Trotskyists. The party, for a long time headed by one Sam Marcy, was originally an opposition group within the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. The Marcyites called themselves the Global Class War Tendency. Their main claim to fame was support for the Soviet Union *against* the Hungarian uprising of 1956. While many Communists got cold feet when Soviet troops of the supposedly peace-loving reformer Khrushchev shot at Hungarian workers in the streets of Budapest, Marcy and his band of followers went in the opposite direction. To the best of my knowledge, the Marcyites are the only Trotskyists that opposed the Hungarian uprising (save a few individuals nominally affiliated to other groups).

Indeed, the WWP are so Stalinistic that their "Trotskyist" identity is a secret, known only to the party members. A leftist group with an esoteric message? In public, the WWP sounds like a more hard line version of the official Communist parties. However, since the covert Trotskyist message of the WWP is based on the idea that the Soviet bloc is part of the "proletarian camp" which Trotskyists must support, it's difficult to see any *real* difference between the public and the private programs of Marcy's movement. My guess is that Marcy decided to keep his (purely nominal) Trotskyism a secret since everything related to Trotsky is automatically considered suspicious by hard core Commies. Uncle Joe, after all, had The Old Man killed south of the river...

"Czechoslovakia: 1968. The Class Character of the Events" is a Marcyite pamphlet originally published in December 1968 under a different title. This is the third printing, dated 1978. It consists of articles from WWP's publication, Workers' World. Most of the articles were written by Sam Marcy himself. Unsurprisingly, Marcy supports the Warsaw Pact invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when Soviet troops smashed the Prague spring and put an end to the reforms of Alexander Dubcek. The articles are surprisingly vulgar, and sound like the worst kind of Stalinist propaganda. CIA agents and Czech Nazis are said to be involved in the "counter-revolution", whose ultimate goal is fascism. West Germany is denounced as an expansionist neo-Nazi state out to get the Soviet Union. Yes, Marcy actually calls West Germany in 1968 "Nazi" and "neo-Nazi"! It is also interesting to note that the WWP refers to Khrushchev and Brezhnev as "revisionists" (the Stalinist term), but don't call Stalin by that term. Stalin merely made "grave and serious errors over many years". Like killing Trotsky? The Czechoslovak president Novotny, a Stalinist rat who only paid lip-service to Khushchev's thaw, is also denounced as a "revisionist". Still, he is apparently better than Dubcek, who is an out-and-out counter-revolutionary.

The WWP then proceeds by attacking Masaryk, Benes and the first Czechoslovak republic. It was based on "national oppression" of Slovaks, Ruthenians, Hungarians and - wait for it - Sudeten Germans, who should have been allowed to join Austria! Interwar Czechoslovakia? National oppression? Compared to whom? Stalin? The notoriously anti-Slovak Novotny? And why is Marcy suddenly so cosy with the Germans? Marcy is right that the Czechoslovak Communist Party did enjoy mass support, and became the largest party in the wake of World War II. He forgets to mention, however, that the Czechoslovak CP was seen as one of the "softer" Communist parties in the emerging Eastern bloc. I doubt the average Bohemian or Slovak would have voted for the Communists if they had sounded like the Workers' World Party! Naturally, Marcy & Co support the Prague coup in 1948, when the Communists turned Czechoslovakia into a one-party state.

Yet, Marcy isn't completely satisfied with the situation in the Soviet bloc post-Lenin. Stalin, after all, made grave mistakes. Finally, we learn that there is a privileged bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and its satellites, and that "revisionism" breeds counter-revolution. More workers' democracy is needed, et cetera. Soviet invasions can only be stopgap measures. So where is salvation to ultimately come from? Incredibly, the WWP believes that the solution has been found in Mao's China. It's called...the Cultural Revolution! Thus, if a real revolutionary leadership would have launched a cultural revolution Chinese style in Czechoslovakia, then...

I admit that I'm speechless. A cultural revolution rather than a political revolution. That, apparently, was Marcy's preferred alternative to Dubcek and the grave errors of Uncle Joe.

Not recommended.