Muddle-headed sectarians vs. the Trotskyite-centrists

A comment on Oehler and the Oehlerites, previously posted at another forum. I admit that I was a bit obsessed by these guys for a while! But then, I´m a sect-watcher, yes?  ;-) 

“Fighting Worker” was a magazine published by the Revolutionary Workers League, a small Marxist group in the United States active during the Great Depression and World War II. The RWL are often referred to as Oehlerites, after their leader Hugo Oehler. Their politics had a family likeness with Trotskyism. Despite Oehler´s constant denunciations of the “Trotskyite-centrists”, his political stance can be seen as a more sectarian form of Trotskyism. Curiously, there was a real Trotskyist group during the 1990´s which also called itself the Revolutionary Workers League and published a magazine named “Fighting Worker”. The groups were not connected in any way, and it´s not clear why RWL 2.0 appropriated the old designations used by the Oehlerites.

This issue of “Fighting Worker” was published in April 1941. The Hitler-Stalin pact was still in force and the Communist Party USA therefore still opposed the Allied war effort and Roosevelt´s war preparations. Supporters and opponents of the war had began to line up on different sides in the unions, effectively creating splits in the CIO, with the Stalinists setting up their own anti-war structures, while the Roosevelt supporters demanded anti-Communist purges. The dreaded “Trotskyite-centrist” Socialist Workers Party also opposed American war moves. So did the RWL, but they nevertheless denounce both the CPUSA and the SWP as “social patriots”. Browder and the Communist Party are “German social-patriots” (due to the Hitler-Stalin pact) eagerly awaiting a chance to support the United States instead (probably a correct observation – the chance came just two months later, when the Nazis attacked the Soviets, who then joined the Allies). Why the SWP are “social patriots” is left unclear, but presumably because of Trotsky´s Proletarian Military Policy, which called for union control of military conscription.  

This issue of “Fighting Worker” also contains two articles on the case of Odell Waller, a Black share-cropper in Alabama sentenced to the electric chair by an all-White jury for the murder of a White landlord. The campaign to free Waller was ultimately unsuccessful, and the young man was executed in 1942. The RWL accuses the “liberals” of “selling out” the defense campaign, but the details are difficult to understand. The campaign to free Waller was, of course, political since it touched directly on Jim Crow and the hated “poll tax”, a tax used to disenfranchise Blacks and poor Whites in many Southern states, and also barred Blacks from becoming jurors. The RWL somehow believed that Democratic Party operatives pushed for a compromise in the Waller case (perhaps life time imprisonment) as part of a broader attempt to keep Blacks off the electoral rolls in the “solid” South.

Today, “Fighting Worker” is mostly of historical interest. While the RWL did participate in union and civil right struggles, their sectarianism (not to mention a number of splits) soon turned them into a footnote in the history of American labor/left radicalism. The group was disbanded during the Cold War. Oehler himself supposedly became a conspiracy theorist interested in the JFK assassination, but I haven´t gotten that rumor confirmed. In another sense, his memory has survived. Trotskyists still use “Oehlerite” as a political insult, meaning “muddle-headed sectarian”!